lATURE PRIMERS 



;iSH LITERATURE 



•PFORD BROOKE 




\ 



YOUMANS'S BOTANY. 

THE FIRST BOOK OF BOTANY, 

Designed to cultivate the Observing Powers of Children. 

By Eliza A. Youmans. 

. i2mo. 183^ pages. 85 cents. 

In the use of this book there are no lessons to •'commit and 
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D. APPLETON & CO., PUBLISHERS, 

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LOCKYER'S ASTRONOMY. 

ELEMENTS OF ASTRONOMY: 

Accompanied with numerous Illustrations, a Colored Repre- 
sentation of the Solar, Stellar, and Nebular Spectra, 
and Celestial Charts of the Northern 
and the Southern Hemisphere. 

By J. Norman Lockyer. 

American edition, revised and specially adapted to the Schools 
of the United States. 

\-2-mo. 312 pa^s. Price, $1.50. 

The volume is as practical as possible. To* aid the student 
in identifpng the stars and constellations, the fine Celestial 
Charts of Arago, which answer all the purposes of a costly Atlas 
of the Heavens, are appended to the work — this being the only 
text-book, as far as the Publishers are aware, that possesses this 
great advantage. Directions are given for finding the most in- 
teresting objects in the heavens at certain hours on different 
evenings throughout the year. Every device is used to make 
the study interesting; and the Publishers feel assured that 
teachers who once try this book will be unwilling to exchange 
it for any other. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

549 & 551 Broadway, New Youl 




Book. 



4-^ 



GIFT OF HEIRS OF 

DR. LOUIS R. KL.EMM 



LOCKYER'S ASTRONOMY. 

ELEMENTS OF ASTRONOMY: 

Accompanied with numerous Illustrations, a Colored Repre- 
sentation of the Solar, Stellar, and Nebular Spectra, 
and Celestial Charts of the Northern 
and the Southern Hemisphere. 

By J. Norman Lockyer. 

American edition^ revised and specially adapted to the Schooli 
of the United States. 

I'zmo. 3x2 Pages. Price^ $1.50. 

The volume is as practical as possible, To' aid the student 
in identifying the stars and constellations, the fine Celestial 
Charts of Arago, which answer all the purposes of a costly Atlas 
of the Heavens, are appended to the work — this being the only 
text-book, as far as the Publishers are aware, that possesses this 
great advantage. Directions are given for finding the most in- 
teresting objects in the heavens at certain hours on dififerent 
evenings throughout the year. Every device is used to make 
the study interesting; and the Publishers feel assured that 
teachers who once try this book will be unwilling to exchange 
it for any other. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

549 & 551 Broadway, New Youl 



LITERATURE PRIMER, .^.v.^ 

by John Richard Green, M. A. 
ENGLISH. 



Edited by JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.i^. 



ENGLISH 

LITERATURE. 



BY THE 

REV. STOPFORD BROOKE, M.A. 



NEW YORK : 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 AND 551 Broadway. 
1878. 



Louis R. Klemm 
Bequest 
Feb. 1926 






CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670— 

1066 , o 5 

CHAPTER II. 

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, I066 — I40O • I9 

CHAPTER III. 

FROM CHAUCER, 1400, TO ELIZABETH, 1 559 . . 4I 

CHAPTER IV. 

FROM 1559 TO 1603 • . . . . 59 

CHAPTER V. 

FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 

1603 — 1660 94 

CHAPTER VI. 

FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 1660 — 

1770 108 

CHAPTER VII. 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE IIL TO 

VICTORIA, 1760 — 1837 126 

CHAPTER VIII. 

FOETRY, FROM 1730 — 1 832 1 39 



PRIMER 

OF 

ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

CHAPTER I. 

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670—1066. 

1. English Literature begins in England about 670. 

2. War Poems. — Beowulf, and Fight at Finnesburg before 600. 

Song of Brunanburh, 937. Fight at Maldon, 991. Odes 
in A.S. Chronicle. 

3. Religious Poems. — Caedmon's Paraphrase of the Bible, 670. 

Poems in the Exeter and the Vercelli book. 

4. The Traveller's Song— the Lament of JJeor — inserted into 

Exeter book from pagan MSS. 

5. TROSE.—Bsddsi's translation of St. ^ohn, 735, King Alfred's 

literary and historical work during his two times of peace, 
880—893 and 897—901. ^Ifric's Translations, 990— 
995, The English Chronicle, ends 1154. 

I. What Literature is. — Before we can enter 
on the story of our English Literature we must try to 
understand what literature itself is. By literature we 
mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent 
men and women arranged in a way which will give 
pleasure to the reader. Literature has to do therefore, 
so far as its subject goes, with all the things about which 
we learn, and think, and feel. As to its form, it has two 
large divisions — one of which is called Prose Literature 
and the other Poetical Literature. 



6 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

2. Prose Literature. — There are many kinds oJ 
prose literature. Men write in prose about philosophy, 
or history, or art, or religion, or science, or manners, 
or the lives of men. Prose literature then means 
the written thoughts, learning, and feelings of men 
on all these subjects. Everything in fact that is 
written of any kind, except poetry, may be called 
prose. But we must not think that everything that is 
called prose is literature. We cannot say, for instance,' 
that a ship's log, or a catalogue, or the daily journal of 
a traveller, is to be called literature simply because 
it is written in prose. Writing is not literature unless 
it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises, not only 
from the things said, but from the way in which they 
are said, and that pleasure is only given when the 
words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put 
together into sentences. To do this in a special way 
is to have what we call style. As much art must 
be used in building sentences up out of words as in 
building houses, if we wish the prose we write to be 
worthy of the name of literature. And just as in look- 
ing at different kinds of houses, we say that one is 
built in a strong way, another in a simple way, another 
in an ornamental way, so we say in reading books 
written by different men that one is in a simple style, 
another in a grand, another in an eloquent style. 
Again, in looking at a large building, we see not only 
the way in which it is built, but also the character and 
the mind of the builder. So also in a prose book which 
is fit to belong to literature we ought to feel that there 
is a distinct mind and character who is speaking to us 
through the style, that is, through the way in which 
the words are put together. Prose then is not litera- 
ture unless it have style and character, and be written 
with cttrious cai-e, 

3. Of Poetical Literature we may say the 
same thing. Poetry must be tried by rules more 
severe even than those by which we judge prose, and 



I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 7 

unless it satisfies those rules it does not take rank as 
literature. There must be more care taken, more 
beauty, more musical movement in the arrangement 
of the words than in prose ; and the way in which the 
thoughts and feehngs of the poet are put together into 
words will always be, in true poetry, wholly different 
from the way in which they would be put together by 
a prose writer. Poetry speaks to us of all that belongs 
to Man, and of all that man feels or sees when he is 
delighted with the beauty or grandeur of the Natural 
World. These are its two chief subjects m literature ; 
and it writes of them in different kinds of poetry, in 
all of which we Enghsh have done well. There is 
epic poetry, like Milton's great poem Paradise Lost, 
dramatic i)oetYy,likQ Shakespeare's plays ; /yr/^ poetry, 
or short pieces on one subject, like the songs in his 
plays; nan^ative poetry, like Scott's Lady of the 
Lake; descriptive poetry, like Thomson's Seasons^ 
which describes nature ; and allegorical ^^o^ixy ^ which 
tells a story with a hidden meaning in it. Of this 
last the best example is Spenser's Faerie Queen, 
These, then, are the two main divisions of literature. 
4. The History of English Literature, then, 
is the story of what great English men and women 
thought and felt, and then wrote down in good 
prose or beautiful poetry in the English language. 
The story is a long one. It begins about the year 
670, and it is still going on in the year 1875. Into 
this little book then is to be put the story of 1,200 
years. No people that have ever been in the world 
can look back so far as we English can to the 
beginnings of our literature ; no people can point to 
so long and splendid a train of poets and prose writers ; 
no nation has on the whole written so much and so 
well. Every English man and woman has good reason 
to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in 
prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good 
book or a good song may say to himself, "" I belong 



8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

to a great company, which has been teaching and 
delighting the world for more than i,ooo years." And 
that is a fact in which those who write and those who 
read ought to feel a noble pride. 

5. The English and the Welsh.— This liter.v 
ture is written in English, the tongue of our fathers. 
They lived, while this island of ours was still called 
Britain, in Sleswick, Jutland and Holstein ; but, either 
because they were pressed from the inland or 
for pure love of adventure, they took to the sea, 
and, landing at various parts of Britain at various 
times drove back, after 150 years of hard fighting, the 
Britons, whom they called Welsh, to the land now 
called Wales, and to Cornwall. It is well for those 
who study English literature to remember that in 
these two places the Britons remained as a distinct 
race with a distinct literature of their own, because 
the stories and the poetr}^ of the Britons crept after- 
wards into English literature and had a great influence 
upon it. The whole tale of King Arthur, of which 
English poetry and even English prose is so full, was 
a British tale. Otherwise we English have nothing to 
do with the old dwellers in our country. We drove 
these Britons, as the Primer of English History will 
describe, utterly away. 

6. The . First English Poetry. — When we 
came to Britain we were great warriors and great 
sea pirates — *' sea wolves " as a Roman poet calls us ; 
and all our poetry down to the present day is full of 
war, and still more of the sea. No nation has ever 
written so much sea-poetry. It was in the blood of 
our fathers, who chanted their sea war-songs as they 
sailed. But we were more than mere warriors. We 
were a home-loving people when we got settled either 
in Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from 
the first writings to th^ last is full of domestic love, 
the dearness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We 
were a religious people, even as heathen, still more 



I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 9 

SO when we became Christian ; and our poetry is as 
much tinged with religion as with war. Whenever 
literature died down in England it rose again in 
poetry ; and the first poetry at each recovery was reli- 
gious, or linked to religion. We shall soon see that 
our first poems were of war and religion. 

7. The English Tongue. — Of the language 
in which our literature is written we can say little 
here ; it is fully discussed in the Primer of Eng- 
lish Grammar. Of course it has changed its look 
very much since it began to be written. The 
earliest form of our English tongue is very different 
from modern English in form, pronunciation, and 
appearance, and one must learn it almost as if it 
were a foreign tongue ; but still the language written 
in the year 700 is the same as that in which the 
prose of the Bible is written just as much as the tree 
planted a hundred years ago is the same tree to-day. 
It is this sameness of language, as well as the same- 
ness of national spirit, which makes our literature one 
literature for 1200 years. 

8. Old English Poetry was also different then 
from what it is now. It was not written in rime, 
nor were its syllables counted. The lines are short ; 
the beat of the verse depends on the emphasis given 
by the use of the same letter, except in the case of 
vowels, at the beginning of words ; and the emphasis 
of the words depends on the thought. The lines are 
written in pairs ; and in the best work the two chief 
words in the first, and the one chief word in the 
second, usually begin with the same letter. Here is 
one example from a war-song : — 

" fFigu 2£^intrum geong 1 *' Warrior of winters young 

^Fordum mselde." | With zt^ords spake." 

After the Norman Conquest there gradually crept 
in a French system of rimes and of metres and 
accent which we find full-grown in Chaucer's works. 



lo 



ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 



[chap. 



But unrimed and alliterative verse lasted in poetry to 
the reign of John, and aUiteration was blended with 
rime up to the sixteenth century. The latest form 
of it occurs in Scotland. 

9. Our Greatest Early Poems remaining are 
two — Beowulf ^nd Ca^dmon's Paraphrase of the Bible, 
The first is on the whole a war story, the second is 
religious j and on these two subjects of war and reli- 
gion English poetry for the most part speaks till the 
Conquest. Beowulf was brought into our land from 
the Continent, and was rewritten in parts by a 
Christian Englishman of Northumbria. It is a story 
of the great deeds and death of a hero named 
Beowulf Its social interest lies in what it tells, us 
of the manners and customs of our forefathers before 
they came here; its poetical interest lies in its de- 
scriptions of wild nature, of the lives and feelings of 
the men of that time, and of the way in which the 
Nature-worship of our people made dreadful and 
savage places seem dwelt in — as if the places had a 
spirit — by monstrous beings. For it was thus that 
all that half-natural, half-spiritual world began in 
our poetry which, when men grew gentler and the 
country more cultivated, became so beautiful as 
faeryland. Here is the description of the dwelling- 
place of the Grendel, a man-fiend that devoured 
men, and whom Beowulf overcomes in battle : — 



** A lonely land 
Won they in ; wolf- caverns, 
Wind-traversed nesses, 
Perilous fen-paths, 
Where the mountain flood, 
Under the mists of the ness, 
Downwards is moved ; 
Flood under feld. 
Not further from hence 



Than a mile's space 
Is the place of the mere ; 
Over which frown 
And rustle the forests. 
Fast-rooted the wood 
The water that shadows ; 
There deadly the wonder 
One may watch every night ; 
Fire in the flood." 



The love of wild nature in our poetry, and the 



I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST, ii 

peopling of it with wild half-human things, begins in 
work like this. After the fight Beowulf returns to his 
own land, where he rules well for many years, till a 
Fire-drake, who guards a treasure, comes down to 
harry his people. The old king goes out then to fight 
his last fight, slays the dragon, but dies of its flaming, 
breath, and his body is burned high up on a sea- 
washed ness or headland. 

10. Csedmon. — The poem of Beowulf has the 
grave Teutonic power, but it is not native to our soil., 
It is not the first true English poem. That is the 
work of C^DMON, and is also from Northumbria. 
The story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the 
making of songs was common at the time. Csedmon, 
was a servant to the monastery of Hild, an abbess ot 
royal blood, at Whitby in Yorkshire. He was some- 
what aged when the gift of song came to him, and he 
knew nothing of the art of verse, so -that at the feasts 
when for the sake of mirth all sang in turn he left the 
table. One night, having done so and gone to the: 
stables, for he had care of the cattle, he fell asleep,, 
and One came to him in vision and said, " Csed- 
mon, sing me some song." And he answered, ^* T 
cannot sing ; for this cause I left the feast and came 
hither." Then said the other, " However, you shall' 
sing." " What shall I sing ? " he replied. " Sing the^ 
beginning of created things," answered the other. 
W^hereupon he began to sing verses to the praise* 
of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had 
sung and added more in verse worthy of God. In^ 
the morning he came to the steward, and told him 
of the gift he had received, and, being brought to 
Hild, was ordered to tell his dream before learned 
men, that they might give judgment whence his verses 
came. And when they had heard, they all said that, 
heavenly grace had been conferred on him by our Lord:. 

11. Csedmon*s Poem, written about 670:^ is for 
us the beginning of Enghsh poetry, and the story 

2 



12 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

of its origin ought to be loved by us. Nor should 
we fail to reverence the place where it began. Above 
the small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises 
and juts out towards the sea the dark cliff where 
Hild's monastery stood, looking out over the Ger- 
man Ocean. It is a wild, wind-swept upland, and 
the sea beats furiously beneath, and standing there 
one feels that it is a fitting birthplace for the 
poetry of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of 
the first poet without the stormy note of the scenery 
.among which it was written. In it also the old fierce 
war element is felt when Caedmon comes to sing the 
fight of the rebel angels with God and the overthrow 
of Pharaoh^s host, and the lines, repeating, as was the 
old English way, the thought a second time, fall like 
stroke on stroke in battle. But the poem is religious 
throughout — Christianity speaks in it simply, sternly, 
with fire, and brings with it a new world of spiritual 
romance and feeling. The subjects of the poem were 
taken from the Bible, in fact Caedmon paraphrased 
the history of the Old and New Testament. He sang 
the creation of the world, the history of Israel, the 
book of Daniel, the whole story of the life of Christ, 
future judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven. All 
who heard it thought it divinely given. *^ Others 
after him," says Baeda, *' tried to make religious poems, 
but none could vie with him, for he did not learn 
the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from 
God." It was thus that English song began in 
religion. The most famous passage of the poem 
not only illustrates the dark sadness, the fierce love of 
freedom, and the power of painting distinct characters 
which has always marked our poetry, but it is also 
famous for its likeness to a parallel passage in Milton. 
It is when Caedmon describes the proud and angry 
cry of Satan against God from his bed of chains in 
hell. The two great EngHsh poets may be brought to- 
gether over a space of a thousand years in another 



I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 13 

way, for both died in such peace that those who 
watched beside them knew not when they died. 

12. Lesser Old English Poems. — Of the 
poetry that came after Caedmon we have few remains. 
But we have many things said which show us that 
his poem, Hke all great works, gave birth to a number 
of similar ones. The increase of monasteries where 
men of letters lived naturally made the written poetry 
religious. But an immense quantity of secular poetry 
was sung about the country. Aldhelm, a young man 
when Caedmon died, and afterwards Abbot of Malmes- 
bury, united the song-maker to the religious poet. 
He was a skilled musician, and it is said that he 
had not his equal in the making or singing of English 
verse. His songs were popular in King Alfred's time, 
and a pretty story tells, that when the traders came 
into the town on the Sunday, he, in the character of 
a gleeman, stood on the bridge and sang them songs, 
with which he mixed up Scripture texts and teaching. 
Of all this wide-spread poetry we have now only the 
few poems brought together in a book preserved at 
Exeter, in another found at Vercelli, and in a few 
leaflets of manuscripts. The poems in the Vercelli 
book are all religious : legends of saints and addresses 
to the soul; those in the Exeter book are hymns and 
sacred poems. The famous Traveller's Song and the 
Lament ^Z^^(?r inserted in it, are of the older and 
pagan time. In both there are poems by Cynewulf, 
whose name has come down to us. They are all 
Christian in tone. The few touches of love of nature 
in them dwell on gentle, not on savage scenery. They 
are sorrowful when they speak of the life of men, 
tender when they touch on the love of home, as tender 
as this little bit which still lives for us out of that old 
world : *' Dear is the welcome guest to the Frisian wife 
when the vessel strands ; his ship is come, and her hus- 
band to his house, her own provider. And she wel- 
comes him in, washes his weedy garment, and clothes 



14 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

him anew. It is pleasant on shore to him whom his 
love awaits." Of the scattered pieces the finest are two 
fragments, one long, on the story oi Judith, and another 
short, in which Death speaks to Man, and describes 
*' the low and hateful and doorless house/^ of which 
he keeps the key. But stern as the fragment is, with its 
EngHsh manner of looking dreadful things in the face, 
and with its English pathos, the religious poetry of our 
old fathers always went with faith beyond the grave. 
Thus we are told that King Eadgar, in the ode on 
his death in the Anglo- Saxo7i Chronicle, '* chose for 
himself another light, beautiful and pleasant, and left 
this feeble life.'' 

13. The War Poetry of England at this time 
was probably as plentiful as the religious. But it was 
not likely to be written down by the writers who lived 
in reHgious houses. It was sung from feast to feast 
and in the halls of kings, and it naturally decayed 
when the English were trodden down by the Normans. 
But we have two examples of what kind it was, 
and how fine it was, in the Battle Song of Bninan- 
hiirh, 937, and in the So7ig of the Fight at Maldon, 
991. A still earlier fragment exists in a short ac- 
count of the Battle of Fijinesburg, probably of the 
same time and belonging to as long a story as the 
story of Beowulf. Two short odes on the victories 
of King Eadmund, and on the coronation of King 
Eadgar, inserted in the Aiiglo-Saxon Chronicle, com- 
plete the list of war poems. 

14. The Songs of Brunanburh and Maldon 
are fine war odes, the fitting sources, both in their 
short and rapid lines, and in their almost Homeric 
simplicity and force, of such war-songs as the ** Battle 
of the Baltic " and the " Charge of the Light Brigade." 
The first describes the fight of King ^thelstan with 
Anlaf the Dane. From morn till night they fought 
till they were "weary of red battle" in the "hard 
hand play," till five young kings and seven earls of 



L] /LATELY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 15 

Anlaf's host lay in that fighting place "quieted by 
swords," and the Northmen fled, and only " the 
screamers of war were left behind, the black raven 
and the eagle to feast on the white flesh, and the 
greedy battle-hawk, and the grey beast the wolf 
in the wood-" The second is the story of the 
death of Brihtnoth, an ealdorman of Northumbria, 
in battle against the Danes, It contains 690 lines. 
In the speeches of heralds and warriors before the 
fight, in the speeches and single combats of the chiefs, 
in the loud laugh and mock which follow a good 
death-stroke, in the rapid rush of the verse when the 
battle is joined, the poem though broken, as Homer's 
verse is not, is Homeric. In the rude chivalry which dis- 
dains to take vantage ground of the Danes, in the way 
\xi which the friends and churls of Brihtnoth die one 
by one, avenging their lord, keeping faithful the tie of 
kinship and clanship, in the cry not to yield a foot's 
breadth of earth, in the loving sadness with which 
home is spoken of, the poem is English to the core. 
And in the midst of it all, like a song from another 
land, but a song heard often in English fights from 
then till now, is the last prayer of the great earl, when 
dying he commends his soul with thankfulness to 
God. 

15. Old English Prose- — It is pleasant to think 
that I may not unfairly make EngHsh prose begin 
with BiEDA. He was born about a.d. 673, and was, 
like Caedmon, a Northumbrian. From 683 he spent 
his life at Jarrow, in the same monastery, he says, 
"and while attentive to the rule of mine order, and 
the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay 
in learning, or teaching, or writing," He long enjoyed 
that pleasure, for his quiet life was long, and from 
boyhood till his very last hour his toil was unceasing. 
Forty-five works prove his industry, and their fame 
over the whole of learned Europe during his time 
proves their value. His learning was as various as 



i6 TIMGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

it was great. All that the world then knew of science, 
music, rhetoric, medicine, arithmetic, astronomy, and 
physics was brought together by him ; and his life was 
as gentle and himself as loved as his work was great. 
His books were written in Latin, and with these we 
have nothing to do, but his was the first effort to 
make Enghsh prose a literary language, for his last 
work was a Translation of the Gospel of St, John^ as 
almost his last words were in English verse. In the 
story of his death told by his disciple Cuthbert is 
the first record of English prose writing. When the last 
day came, the dying man called his scholars to him 
that he might dictate more of his translation. "There 
is still a chapter wanting/' said the scribe, " and it is 
hard for thee to question thyself longer." "It is easily 
done," said Baeda, "take thy pen and ^vrite quickly." 
Through the day they wrote, and when evening fell, 
"There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," said 
the youth. " Write it quickly," said the master. " It 
is finished now." "Thou sayest truth," was the reply,, 
"all is finished now." He sang the " Glory to God" 
and died. It is to that scene that English prose looks 
back as its sacred source, as it is in the greatness 
and variety of Baeda's Latin work that English litera- 
ture strikes its key-note. 

1 6. iElfred's Work. — When Baeda died North- 
umbria was the home of English literature. Though 
as yet written mostly in Latin, it was a wide- spread 
literature. Wilfrid of York and Benedict Biscop 
had founded libraries and established monastic 
schools far and wide. Six hundred scholars gathered 
round B^da ere he died. But towards the end of 
his life this northern literature began to decay, anrl 
after %66 it was, we may say, blotted out by the 
Danes. The long battle with these invaders was 
lost in Northumbria, but it was gained for a time by 
Alfred the Great in Wessex ; and with Alfred's lite- 
rary work learning changed its seat from the north 



I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 17 

to the south. But he made it by his writings an Eng- 
lish, not a Latin Uterature ; and in his translations he, 
since Baeda's work is lost, is the true father of English 
prose. As Whitby is the cradle of English poetry, so 
is Winchester of English prose. At Winchester Alfred 
took the English tongue and made it the tongue in 
which history, philosophy, law and religion spoke to the 
English people. No work was ever done more eagerly, 
or more practically. He brought scholars from different 
parts of the world. He set up schools in his monas- 
teries "where every free-born youth, who has the means, 
shall attend to his book till he can read English 
writing perfectly." He presided over a school in his 
own court. He made himself a master of a literary 
English style, and he did this that he might teach his 
people. He translated the popular manuals of the 
time into EngHsh, but he edited them with large 
additions of his own, needful, as he thought, for 
Enghsh use. He gave his nation moral philosophy in 
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- 
tory, with geographical chapters of his own, in the 
History of Orosius ; a history of England in Bcedds 
History^ giving to some details a West Saxon form ; 
and a religious handbook in the Pastoral Rule of 
Pope Gregory. We do not quite know whether 
he worked himself at the English or Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle, but at least it was in his reign that it 
rose out of meagre lists into a full narrative of 
events. To him, then, we English look back as the 
father of English literature, 

17. The Later Old English Prose.— The im- 
pulse he gave soon fell away, but it was revived under 
King Eadgar, when ^thelwald, Bishop of Winchester, 
made it his constant work to keep up English schools 
and to translate Latin works into English, and when 
Archbishop Dunstan took up the same pursuits with 
eagerness. ^thelwald's school sent out from it a 
scholar and abbot named ^lfric. He takes rank as 



i8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

the first large translator of the Bible, turning into 
English the first seven books and part of Job. We owe 
to him a series of Homilies^ and his Colloquy^ after- 
wards edited by another ^Ifric, may be called the first 
English-Latin dictionary. But this revival had no 
sooner begun to take root than the Northmen came 
again in force upon the land and conquered it. During 
the long interweaving of Danes and English together 
under Danish kings from 1013 to T042, no EngUsh 
literature arose. It was not till the quiet reign of 
Edward the Confessor it again began to Hve. But 
no sooner was it born than the Norman invasion 
repressed, but did not quench its life. 

18. The English Chronicle. — One great monu- 
ment, however, of old English prose lasts beyond the 
Conquest. It is the English Chronicle, and in it our 
literature is continuous from ^^Ifred to Stephen. At 
first it was nothing but a record of the births and 
deaths of bishops and kings, and was probably a 
West Saxon Chronicle. Alfred edited it from various 
sources, added largely to it from Baeda, and raised it 
to the dignity of a national history. After his reign, and 
that of his son Eadward, 901-925, it becomes scanty, 
but songs and odes are inserted in it. In the reign of 
-.^thelred and during the Danish kings its fulness 
returns, and growing by additions from various quarters, 
it continues to be our great contemporary authority 
in Enghsh history till 1154, when it abruptly closes 
with the death of Stephen. ^* It is the first history of 
any Teutonic people in their own language ; it is the 
earliest and the most venerable monument of English 
prose." In it old English poetry sang its last song, 
in its death old English prose dies. It is not till the 
reign of John that English poetry in any extended form 
appears again in the Brut of Layamon. It is not till 
the reign of Edward the Third that original English 
prose again begins. 



II,] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. i9 

CHAPTER II. 

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066 — 1400- 

Layamon's B7'ut, 1205- — Ormin's Ormuluni^ 1215- — Sir 
John Mandeville's Travels, 1356.— William Langland's 
Vision concerning Piers the Plowman, 1362 — 1378- — John 
Wyclifs Translation of the Bible, 1380- — ^John Gower's Con- 
fessio A mantis, 1393 — 4- 

Geoffrey Chaucer, born 1340, died 1400- — Dethe of Blaunche 
the Duchesse, 1369- — Troylus ' and Creseide. — Parlament 
of Foules. — Compleynt of Mars. — Anelida and A r cite. — 
Hous of Fame. 1374 — \ZS^' —Tegende of Good Women, 
1385. — Prose Treatise on Astrolabe, 1391-— Canterbury 
Tales, 1373 to 1400. 

19. General Outline. — The invasion of Britain 
by the English made, the island, its speech and its 
literature, English. The invasion of England by the 
Danes left our speech and literature still English. 
The Danes were of our stock and tongue, and we 
absorbed them. The invasion of England by the 
Normans seemed likely to crush the English people, 
to root out their literature, and even to threaten their 
speech. But that which happened to the Danes hap- 
pened to the Normans also, and for the same reason. 
They were originally of like blood to the English, 
and of like speech ; and though during their settle- 
ment in Normandy they had become French in 
manner and language, and their literature French, 
yet the old blood prevailed in the end. The Nor- 
man felt his kindred with the English tongue and 
spirit, became an Englishman, and left the French 
tongue to speak and write in English. We absorbed 
the Normans, and we took into our literature and 
speech some French elements they had brought with 
them. It was a process slower in literature than it 



20 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

was in the political history, but it began from the 
political struggle. Up to the time of Henry II. the 
Norman troubled himself but little about the English 
tongue. But when French foreigners came pouring 
into the land in the train of Henry and his sons, the 
Norman allied himself with the Englishman against 
these foreigners, and the English tongue began to 
rise into importance. Its literature grew slowly, but 
as quickly as most of the literatures of Europe, and 
It never ceased to grow. ** The last memoranda of the 
Peterborough Chronicle are of year 1154. the last 
extant English Charter can scarcely be earlier than 
1 155.'* There are Enghsh sermons of the same 
century, and now, early in the next century, at the 
central time of this struggle, after the death of Richard 
the First, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormiilum 
come forth within ten years of each other to prove 
the continuit}^, the survival, and the victory of 
the English tongue. When the patriotic struggle 
closed in the reign of Edward L, English literature 
had risen again through the song, the sermon, and the 
poem, into importance, and was written by a people 
made up of Norman and Englishman welded into one 
by the fight against the foreigner. But though the 
foreigner was driven out, his literature influenced and 
continued to influence, the new English poetry. The 
poetry, we say, for in this revival our literature was 
only poetical. All prose, with the exception of a few 
sermons and some religious works from the French, 
was written in Latin. 

20. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the 
two main streams into which this poetical literature 
divides itself. The religious poetry is entirely English 
In spirit and a poetry of the people, from the Ormulum 
of Ormin, 12 15, to the Vision of Piers the Plowman^ 
in which poem the distinctly English poetry reached its 
truest expression in 1362. The story-telling poetry 
is English at its beginning but becomes more and 



IL] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 21 

more influenced by the romantic poetry of France, 
and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry 
of the court and of high society, a Hterary in contrast 
with a popular poetry. But even in this the spirit of 
the poetry is EngHsh, though the manner is French. 
Chaucer becomes less French and even less Italian, 
till at last we find him entirely national in the 
Canterbury Tales, the best English example of story- 
telling we possess. The struggle then of England 
against the foreigner to become and remain England 
finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry 
against the influence of foreign poetry to become and 
remain English. Both struggles were long and weari- 
some, but in both England was triumphant. She 
became a nation, and she won a national literature. 
It is the steps of this struggle we have now to trace 
along the two lines already laid down — the poetry 
of religion and the poetry of story-telling ; but to do 
so w^e must begin in both instances with the Norman 
Conquest. 

21. The Religious Poetry. — The religious re- 
vival of the nth century was strongly felt in Normandy, 
and both the knights and Churchmen who came to Eng- 
land with William the Conqueror and during his son's 
reign were founders of abbeys whence the country was 
civilized. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England 
was further quickened by missionary monks sent by 
Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild 
St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well-watered 
valleys of the North. The English citizens of London, 
and the English peasants in the country received a 
new religious life from the foreign noble and the 
foreign monk, and both were drawn together through 
a common worship. When this took place a desire 
arose for religious handbooks in the English tongue. 
Ormin's Or?nulum is a type of these. We may date it, 
though not precisely, at 12 15, the date of the Great 
Charter. It is entirely English, not five French words 



22 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of 
the service of each day with the addition of a ser- 
mon in verse. The book was called Ormtdumy " for 
this that Orm it wrought," Orm being a contraction 
for Ormin. It marks the rise of English religious 
literature, and its rehgion is simple and rustic. Orm's 
ideal monk is to be '^ a very pure man, and altogether 
without property, except that he shall be found in 
simple meat and clothes." He will have "a hard and 
stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart 
and desire ought to be aye toward heaven, and his 
Master well to serve.'' This was English religion in 
the country at this date. 

22. Literature and the Friars. — There was 
little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. 
In 122 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and 
they chose the towns for their work. Their influence 
was great, and they drew Norman and English more 
closely together on the ground of religion. The first 
Friars were foreigners, and they necessarily used many 
French words in their English teaching, and Normans 
as well as English now began to write religious works 
in English. In 1303 Robert of Brunne translated a 
French poem, the Manual of Sins (written thirty years 
earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of 
Handlyng Smne, William of Shoreham translated the 
whole of the Psalter mto English prose about 1327, and 
wrote religious poems. The Cursor Mtindi^ written 
about 1320, and thought ^* the best book of all" by 
men of that time, was a metrical version of the Old 
and New Testament, interspersed, as was the Hand- 
lyng Sinne, with legends of saints. Some scattered 
Sermons, and in 1340 XhQ Aye7ibtte of Inwyt (Remorse 
of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how 
English prose was rising through religion. About the 
same year Richard Rolle of Hampole wrote in Latin 
and in Northumbrian English for the " unlearned," 
a poem called the Fricke of Conscience^ and some 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 33 

prose treatises. The poem marks the close of the 
religious influence of the Friars. They had been 
attacked before in a poem of 1320; but in this 
poem there is not a word said against them. It is 
true the author, living far in the country, may not 
have been thrown much with them. Twenty years 
later however all is changed; and in the Vision of 
Piers the Plowman^ the protest its writer makes for 
purity of life is also a protest against the foul life and 
the hypocrisy of the Friars. In that poem, as we 
shall see, the whole of the popular EngHsh religion 
of the time of Chaucer is represented. In it also 
the natural, unliterary, country English is best repre- 
sented. It brings us up in the death of its author 
to the year 1400, the same year in which Chaucer 
died. 

23. History and the Story-telling Poetry. — 
The Normans brought an historical taste with them to 
England, and created a most valuable historical litera- 
ture. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing 
to do with it till story-telling grew out of it in the 
time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such 
importance that a few things must be said about it. 

(i) The men who wrote it were called Chron- 
iclers. At first they were mere annalists — that is, they 
jotted down the events of year after year without 
any attempt to bind them together into a connected 
whole. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., 
another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scat- 
tered monasteries, but in the Court. Living at the 
centre of political life, their histories were written in a 
philosophic spirit, and wove into a whole the growth 
of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad. 
They are our great authorities for the history of these 
times. They begin with WilliaiJi of Mabnesbiiry, 
whose book ends in 1142, and die out after Matthew 
Paris, 1235—73. Historical literature in England is 
only represented after the death of Henry III. by a 
3 



24 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

few dry Latin annalists till it rose again in modern 
English prose in 15 13, when Sir Thomas More's 
Life of Edward V, and Richai'd IIL is said to have 
been written. 

(2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up 
among these Norman historians. English patriotism 
was far from having died among the English them- 
selves. The Sayings of Alfred about 1200, were 
written in English by the English. These and some 
ballads, as well as the early English war songs, inter- 
ested the Norman historians and were collected 
by them. William of Malmesbury, who was born of 
English and Norman parents, has sympathies with 
both peoples, and his history marks how both were 
becoming one nation. The same welding together of 
the conquered and the conquerors is seen in the 
others till we come to Matthew Paris, whose view of 
history is entirely that of an Englishman. When he 
wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman 
abbot and English priest, were, and are in his pages, 
one in blood and one in interests. 

24. English Story-telling grew out of this his- 
torical literature. There was a Welsh priest at the 
court of Henry I., called Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
who took upon himself to write history. He had been 
given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to translate 
which told in verse the history of Britain from the 
days when Brut, the great grandson of ^neas, landed 
on its shores, through the whole history of King 
Arthur and his Round Table down to Cadwallo, a 
Welsh king who died in 689. The Latin translation 
he made of this he called a history. The real his- 
torians were angry at the fiction, and declared that 
throughout the whole of it " he had lied saucily and 
shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting 
together of a number of Welsh legends, but it was 
the beginning of story 'telling in our land. Every- 
one who read it was delighted with it \ it made, as 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 25 

we should say, a sensation, and as much on the 
Continent as in England. In it the Welsh had in 
some sort their revenge, for in its stories they invaded 
English Uterature, and their tales have never since 
ceased to live in it. They charm us as much in 
Tennyson's Idylls of the King as they charmed us 
in the days of Henry I. But the stories Geoffrey 
of Monmouth told were in the Latin tongue. They 
were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar. 
They got afterwards to France and, added to from 
Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked 
out with the ornaments of French romance. In that 
form they came back to England as the work of 
Wace^ a Norman trouveur, who called his poem the 
Brut, and completed it in 1155, shortly after the 
accession of Henry If. 

25. Layamon's ** Brut.*' — In this French form 
the story drifted through England,and at last falHng into 
the hands of an Enghsh priest in Worcestershire, he re- 
solved to tell it in English verse to his countrymen, 
and doing so became the author of our first English 
poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say that 
its date is 1205, ten years or so before the Ormu- 
hcm was written, ten years before the Great Charter. 
It is plain that its composition, though it told a 
Welsh story, was looked on as a patriotic work 
by the writer. *^ There was a priest in the land," he 
writes of himself, "whose name was Layamon; he 
was son of Leovenath : May the Lord be gracious 
unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on 
the bank of Severn, near Radstone, where he read 
books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest 
thought that he would tell the noble deeds of England, 
what the men were named, and whence they came, 
who first had EngUsh land." And it was truly of great 
importance. The poem opened to the imagination of 
the English people an immense past for the history of 
the island they dwelt in, and made a common bond 



26 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

of interest between Norman and Englishman. Though 
chiefly rendered from the French, there are not fifty 
Norman words in its more than 30,000 Unes. 'J'he 
old English alliterative metre is kept up with a few 
rare rimes. As we read the short quick lines in which 
the battles are described, as we listen to the simple 
metaphors, and feel the strong, rude character of the 
poem, it is as if we were reading Caedmon ; and what 
Caedmon was to early English poetry, Layamon is to 
English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first of 
the new singers. 

26. Story-telling grows French in form. — 
After an interval the desire for story-telling increased 
in England- The story of Genesis and Exodus was 
versified about 1250, and in it and some others about 
the same date rimes are used. Many tales of Arthur's 
knights, and other tales which had an English origin, 
such as the lays of Havelok the Dane and of King Horn 
(about 1280) were translated from the French ; Robert 
of Gloucester wrote his Riming Chronicle^ 1298, and 
the Romance of King Alexander^ about 1280, originally 
a Greek work, was adapted from the French into En- 
glish. As the dates grow nearer to 1300, seven years 
before the death of Edward I., the amount of French 
words increases, and the French romantic manner of 
telling stories is more and more marked. In the Lay 
of Havelok the spirit and descriptions of the poem 
still resemble old English work ; in the Romance of 
Alexander^ on the other hand, the natural landscape, 
the conventional introductions to the parts, the gor- 
geous descriptions of pomps, and armour, and cities, 
the magic wonders, the manners, and feasts, and 
batdes of chivalry, the love passages, are all steeped 
in the colours of French romantic poetry. Now this 
romance was adapted by a Frenchman in the year 
1200. (?) It took therefore nearly a century before the 
French romantic manner of poetry could be natural- 
ized in Enghsh ; and it was naturalized, curious to 



il] from the conquest to CHAUCER, 27 

say, at the very time when England as a nation had 
lost its French elements and become entirely English. 
Finally, the influence of this French school in England 
is seen in the earlier poems of Chaucer, and in poems, 
such as the Court of Love ^ attributed to him. It came 
to its height and died in the translation of the Romatint 
of the jRosey the last and crowning effort also of French 
romance. After that time the story-telling of England 
sought its subjects in another country than France. 
It turned to Italy. 

27. English I^yrics. — In the midst of all this story- 
telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be 
so lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, 
some lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, 
later on, some war songs. The English ballad, sung 
from town to town by wandering gleemen, had never 
altogether died. A number of rude ballads collected 
round the legendary Robm Hood, and the kind of poetic 
literature which sung of the outlaw and the forest, and 
afterwards so fully of the wild border life, gradually 
took form. About 1280 a beautiful Httle idyll, called 
The Owl and the Nightingale, was written in Dorset- 
shire, in which the author, Nicholas of Guildford, 
judges between the rival birds. In 1300 we meet 
with a few lyric poems, full of charm. They sing of 
springtime with its blossoms, of the woods ringing 
with the thrush and nightingale, of the flowers and the 
seemly sun, of country work, of the woes and joy of 
love, and many other delightful things. They are 
tinged with the colour of French romance, but they 
have an Enghsh background. We read nothing like 
them, except in Scotland, till we come to the Eliza- 
bethan time. After this, in 1352, the war lyrics of 
Laurence Mijiot sing the great deeds and battles of 
Edward III. 

28. The King's English, — We have thus traced 
the rise of our English literature to the time of Chaucer. 
We must now complete the sketch by a word or two 



28 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [chap. 

on the language in which it was written. The literary 
EngUsh language seemed at first to be destroyed by 
the Conquest. It lingered till Stephen's death in the 
English Chronicle ; a few traces of it are still found 
about Henry III.'s death in the Brut of Layamon. 
But, practically speaking, from the 12th century till 
the middle of the 14th there was no standard of 
English. The language, spoken only by the people, 
fell back into that broken state of anarchy in which 
each part of the country has its own dialect, and each 
writer uses the dialect of his own dwelling-place. All 
the poems then of which we have spoken were written 
in dialects of English, not in a fixed English common 
to all writers. French or Latin was the language of 
literature and of the literary class. But towards the 
middle of Edward the Third's reign English got the 
better of French. After the Black Death in 1349 
French was less used; in 1362 English was made the 
language of the courts of law. At the same time a 
standard English language was born. It did not over- 
throw the dialects, for the Vision of Piers the Plowman 
and Wyclif's Translation of the Bible are both in a 
dialect ; but it stood forth as the literary language in 
which all future English literature had to be written. 
It had been growing up in Robert of Brunne's work, 
and in the Romance of King Alexander ; but it was 
fixed into clear form by Chaucer and Gower. It was 
in fact the English language talked in the Court and in 
the Court society to which these poets belonged. It 
was the King's English, and the fact that it was the 
tongue of the best and most cultivated society, as well 
as the great excellence of the works written in it by 
these poets, made it at once the tongue of literature. 

29. Religious Literature in Langland and 
Wyclif. — We have traced the work of *' transition 
English," as it has been called, along the lines of 
popular religion and story-telling. The first of these, 
in the realm of poetry, reaches its goal in the work of 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 29 

William Langland ; in the realm of prose it reaches 
its goal in Wyclif. In both these writers, the work 
differs from any that went before it, by its extraordinary 
power, and by the depth of its religious feeling. It is 
plain that it represented a society much more strongly 
moved by religion than that of the beginning of the 
fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the voice comes from 
the university, and it went all over the land in the 
body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent forth. 
In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the centre 
of the people themselves ; his poem is written in a 
rude English dialect, in alliterative English verse, and 
in the old English manner. The, very ploughboy could 
understand it. It became the book of those who 
desired social and Church reform. It was as eagerly 
read by the free labourers and fugitive serfs who col- 
lected round John Ball and Wat Tyler. 

30. Causes of the Religious Revival. — It was 
originally due to the preaching of the Friars in the last 
century and to the noble example they set of devotion 
to the poor. When the Friars however became rich, 
though pretending to be poor, and impure of life, 
though pretending to goodness, the religious feeling 
they had stirred turned against themselves, and its two 
strongest cries, both on the Continent and in England, 
were for Truth, and for Purity, in life and in the 
Church. 

Another cause common to the Continent and to 
England in this century was the movement for the 
equal rights of man against the class system of the 
middle ages. It was made a religious movement 
when men said that they were equal before God, and 
that goodness in His eyes was the only nobility. 
And it brought with it a religious protest against the 
oppression of the people by the class of the nobles. 

There were two other causes, however, special to 
England at this time. One was the utter misery of 
the people owing to the French wars. Heavy taxation 



30 ENGLISH LITER A TURE , [chap. 

fell upon them, and they were ground down by severe 
laws, which prevented them bettering themselves. 
They felt this all the more because so many of them 
had bought their freedom, and began to feel the delight 
of freedom. It was then that in their misery they 
turned to religion, not only as their only refuge, but as 
supplying them with reasons for a social revolution. 
The other cause was the Black Death, the great 
Plague which, in 1349, '(>2^ and '69, swept over England. 
Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages were left 
uninhabited ; a wild panic fell upon the people, which 
was added to by a terrible tempest in 1362, that to 
men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their terror 
then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 

3 r. Piers the Plowman. — All these elements are 
to be found fully represented in the Vision of Piers the 
Plowman. Its author, William Langland, though we 
are not certain of his surname, was born about 1332, 
at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His " Vision " 
begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern 
Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in 
the country in 1362. At the accession of Richard II., 
1377, he was in London. The great popularity of his 
poem made him in that year, and again in the next 
year, send forth two more texts of his poem. In these 
texts he added to the original Vision the poems oi Do 
Wel^ Do Bet, and Do Best. In 1399, he wrote at 
Bristol his last poem, The Deposition of Richard IL, 
and then died, probably in 1400. 

He paints his portrait as he was when he lived in 
Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men called Long 
Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he sung 
for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating 
to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the 
lords and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he 
stalked in observant moodiness along the Strand. It 
is this figure, which in indignant sorrow walks through 
the whole poem. 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 31 

32. His Vision. — The dream of the ''field full of 
folk," with wJiich it begins, brings together nearly as 
many typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. 
In the first part, the Truth sought for is righteous deal- 
ing in Church, and Law, and State. In the second 
part, the Truth sought for is that of righteous life. 
None of those who wish to find Truth know the way, 
till Piers the Plowman, who at last enters the poem, 
directs them aright. The search for a righteous life 
is a search to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the 
three titles of the poems which were added afterwards. 
In a series of dreams, and a highly-wrought allegory, 
Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best, are identified with 
Jesus Christ, who appears at last as Love, in the dress 
of Piers the Plowman. The second of these poems 
describes Christ's death, His struggle with sin, His resur- 
rection, and the victory over Death and the Devil. And 
the dreamer wakes in a transport of joy, with the Easter 
chimes pealing in his ears. But as Langland looked 
round on the world, the victory did not seem real, and 
the stern dreamer passed out of triumph into the dark 
sorrow in which he lived. He dreams again in Do 
Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the earth, the reign of 
Antichrist. Evils attack the Church and mankind. 
Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the Friars, besiege 
Conscience. Conscience cries on Contrition to help 
him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but 
despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to 
wander over the world, praying for luck and health, 
''till he have Piers the Plowman,'' till he find the 
Saviour. 

This is the poem which wrought so strongly in 
men's minds that its influence was almost as great 
as Wyclif 's in the revolt which had now begun against 
Latin Christianity. Its fame was so great, that it 
produced imitators. In 1394, another alHterative 
poem was set forth by an unknown author, with the 
title of Pierce the Plowmaiis Crede, and the Plowman's 



32 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

Tale attributed to Chaucer is another witness to the 
popularity of Langland. 

ZZ^ Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was 
being read all over England, John Wydif, about 1380, 
began his work in the English tongue with our first 
complete translation of the Bihle^ and in it did as 
much probably to fix our language as Chaucer 
did in his Tales. But he did much more than 
this for our tongue. He made it the popular lan- 
guage of religious thought and feeling. In 138 1 
he was in full battle with the Church on the doctrine 
of tran substantiation, and was condemned to silence. 
He replied by appealing to the whole of England 
in the speech of the people. He sent forth tract after 
tract, sermon after sermon, couched not in the dry, 
philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in short, 
sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words 
used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all 
the doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the 
Church of Rome. He was our first Protestant. It 
was a new literary vein to open, the vein of the pam- 
phleteer. With his work then, and with I.angland's, 
we bring to the year 1400 the English prose and 
poetry pertaining to religion w^hich we have been 
tracing since the Conquest. 

34. Story-telling is the other line on which we 
have placed our literature, and it is represented first 
by John Gower. He belongs to a school older than 
Chaucer, inasmuch as he is never touched by the 
Italian, only by the French influence. He belongs 
to a different school even as an artist ; for his tales 
are not pure story-telling like Chaucer's, but tales 
with a special moral. Partly the religious and social 
reformer, and partly the story-teller, he represents a 
transition and fills up the intellectual space between 
Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Saviour, 
at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his 
three great works, the Speculum Medita?itis, the Vox 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 33 

Clamantis^ the Coiifessio Ainantis^ 13 93- It marks 
the unsettled state of our literary language, that each 
of these was written in a different tongue, the first in 
French, the second in Latin, the third in English. 

The third is his English work. In 30,000 lines or 
more, he mingles up allegory, morality, the sciences, 
the philosophy of Aristotle, all the studies of the day, 
with comic or tragic tales as illustrations. We have 
seen that Robert de Brunne was the first to do this ; 
Gower was the second. The tales are wearisome and 
long, and the smoothness of the verse makes them 
more wearisome. Gower was a careful writer of Eng- 
lish ; and in his satire of evils, and in his grave reproof 
of the follies of Richard II., he rises into his best 
strain. The king himself, even though reproved, was a 
patron of the poet. It was as Gower was rowing on the 
Thames that the royal barge drew near, and he was 
called to the king's side. ** Book some new thing," 
said the king, '' in the way you are used, into which 
book I myself may often look ; " and the request was 
the origin of the Confession of a Lover, It is with 
pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent 
to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower, 
with perhaps some of the irony of an artist, "the moral 
Gower.'' 

35. Chaucer's French Period. — Geoffrey Chau- 
cer was the son of a vintner, of Thames Street, London, 
and was born, it is now beHeved, in 1340. He lived 
almost all his life in London, in the centre of its work 
and society. When he was sixteen he became page 
to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and con- 
tinued at the Court till he joined the army in France 
in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but was ransomed 
at the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360. We then know 
nothing of his life for six years ; but from items in 
the Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again 
connected with the Court, from 1366 to 1372. It 
was during this time that he began to write. His first 



34 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

poem may have been the A, B, C, a prayer Englished 
from the French at the request of the Duchess Blanche. 
The translation of the Romaimt of the Rose has been 
attributed to him, but the best critics are doubtful of, 
or deny, his authorship. They are only sure of 
two poems, the Compleynie to Pity in 1368, and in the 
next year the Dethe of Blaiinche the Dtichesse, whose 
husband, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's patron. These, 
being written under the influence of French poetry, 
are classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. 
There are lines in them which seem to speak of a 
luckless love aifair, and in this broken love it has been 
supposed we find the key to Chaucer's early life. 

36. Chaucer's Italian Period. — Chaucer's 
second poetic period may be called the period of 
Italian influence, from 1372 to 1384. During these 
years he went for the king on no less than seven 
diplomatic missions. Three of these, in 1372, '74, 
and '78, were to Italy. At that time the great Italian 
literature which inspired then, and still inspires, Euro- 
pean literature, had reached full growth, and it opened 
to Chaucer a new world of art. If he read the Vita 
Nuova, and the Divina Commedia of Dante, he 
knew for the first time the power and range of 
poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, and he 
learnt what is meant by ''form " in poetry. He read 
the tales of Boccaccio who made Italian prose, and in 
them he first saw how to tell a story exquisitely. 
Petrarca and Boccaccio he may even have met, for 
they died in 1374 and 1375, but he never saw Dante, 
who died at Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back 
from these journeys he was a new man. He threw 
aside the romantic poetry of France, and laughed at 
it in his gay and kindly manner in the Riirie of Sir 
Thopas, afterwards made one of the Caiiterbury Tales, 
His chief work of this time bears witness to the influ- 
ence of Italy. It was Troylus a7id Creseide, 1382 (?), 
which is a translation, with many changes and addi- 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 35 

tions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The additions 
(and he nearly doubled the poem) are stamped with 
his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and simplicity. 
His changes from the original are all towards the side 
of purity, good taste, and piety. We meet the further 
influence of Boccaccio in the birth of some of the 
Caiiterbury Tales, and of Petrarca in the Tales them- 
selves. To this time is now referred the tale of the 
Second Nun, that of the Doctor, the Man of Law, 
the Clerk, the Prioress, the Squire, the Franklin, Sir 
Thopas, and the first draft of the Knight's Tale, 
borrowed, but very slightly, from the Teseide of 
Boccaccio. The other poems of this period were the 
Parlament of Foules, the Compleynt of Mars, Aiielida 
and Arcite, Boece, and the For77ier Age, all between 
1374 and '76, the lilies to Adam Scrivener, 1383, and 
the Hous of Fame, 1384 (?). In the passion with 
which Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus 
and Anelida, some have traced the lingering sorrow 
of his early love affair. But if this be true, it was 
now passing away, for in the creation of Pandarus in 
the Troilus, and in the delightful fun of the Parla- 
ment of Foules, a new Chaucer appears, the humorous 
poet of the Canterbury Tales, In the active business 
life he led during this period he was likely to grow 
out of mere sentiment, for he was not only employed 
on service abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he 
was Comptroller of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of 
the Petty Customs, and in 1386 Member of Par- 
liament for Kent. 

37. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the 
next period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind 
Italian influence as he had left French, and became 
entirely himself, entirely English. The compara- 
tive poverty in which he now lived, and the loss of 
his offices, for in John of G aunt's absence he lost 
Court favour, may have given him more time for 
study, and the retired life of a poet. At least in 
4 



36 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. | chap. 

his Legende of Good Womc7i, the prologue to which 
was written in 1385, we find him a closer student than 
ever of books and of nature. His appointment as 
Clerk of the Works in 1389 brought him again into 
contact with men. He superintended the repairs 
and building at the Palace of Westminster, the 
Tower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 
139 1, when he was superseded, and lived on pensions 
allotted to him by Richard and by Henry IV., after 
he had sent the King in 1399 his Compleint to his 
Purse. Before 1390, however, he had added to his 
.great work its best tales, those of the Miller, the 
Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, 
the Friar, the Nun, Priest, Pardoner, and perhaps 
the Sompnour. The Prologue was probably written 
in 1388. In these, in their humour, \x\ their vivid- 
ness of portraiture, in their ease of narration, and in 
the variety of their characters, Chaucer shines supreme. 
A few smaller poems belong to this best time, such as 
Truth and the Moder of God. 

During the last ten years of his life, which may be 
called the period of his decay, he wrote some small 
poems, and along with the Compleynte of Venus ^ and 
a prose treatise on the Astrolabe, five more tales, 
'the Canon's, Yeoman's, Manciple's, Monk's, and 
Parsone's. The last was written the year of his death, 
1400. Having done this work, he died in a house 
under the shadow of the Abbey of Westminster. 
Within the w^alls of the Abbey Church, the first of 
the poets who lies there, that '' sacred and happy 
spirit '^ sleeps. 

38. Chaucer's Character Born of the tradesman 

class, Chaucer was in every sense of the word one of 
our finest gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, 
glad of heart, humourous, and satirical without 
unkindness ; sensitive to every change of feeling in 
himself and others, and therefore full of sympathy ; 
brave in misfortune, even to mirth, and doing well 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 37 

and with careful honesty all he undertook. His 
first and great delight was in human nature, and 
he makes us love the noble characters in his poems 
and feel with kindliness towards the baser and ruder 
sort. He never sneers, for he had a wide charity, 
and we can always smile in his pages at the follies 
and forgive the sins of men. He had a true and 
chivalrous regard for women, and his wife and he 
must have been very happy if they fulfilled the ideal 
he had of marriage. He lived in aristocratic society, 
and yet he thought him the greatest gentleman who 
was " most vertuous alway, prive, and pert (open), and 
most entendeth aye to do the gentil dedes that he 
can." He lived frankly among men, and as we have 
seen, saw many different types of men, and in his 
own time filled many parts as a man of the world and 
of business. Yet, with all this active and observant 
life, he was commonly very quiet and kept much to 
himself. The Host in the Tales japes at him for his 
lonely, abstracted air. "Thou lookest as thou wouldest 
find a hare, And ever on the ground I see thee stare." 
Being a good scholar, he read morning and night alone, 
and he says that after his (office) work he would go 
home and sit at another book as dumb as a stone, till his 
look was dazed. While at study and when he was 
making of songs and ditties, '^ nothing else that God 
had made " had any interest for him. There was but 
one thing that roused him then, and that too he liked 
to enjoy alone. It was the beauty of the morning and 
the fields, the woods, and streams, and flowers^ and 
the singing of the little birds. This made his heart 
full of revel and solace, and when spring came after 
winter, he rose with the lark and cried, " Farewell my 
book and my devotion." He was the first who made 
the love of nature a distinct element in our poetry, 
ile was the first who, in spending the whole day 
gazing alone on the daisy, set going that lonely delight 
in natural scenery which is so special a r*:: rk of our 



38 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

later poets. He lived thus a double life, in and out 
of the world, but never a gloomy one. For he was 
fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew 
towards age, was portly of waist, "no poppet to 
embrace." But he kept to the end his elvish coun- 
tenance, the shy, deHcate, half mischievous face 
which looked on men from its grey hair and forked 
beard, and was set off by his light grey-coloured dress 
and hood. A knife and inkhorn hung on his dress, 
we see a rosary in his hand, and when he was alone 
he walked swiftly. 

39. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is 
not easy to speak briefly, because of its great 
variety. Enough has been said of it, with the ex- 
ception of his most complete creation, the Can- 
terbury Tales. It will be seen from the dates given 
above that they were not written at one time. 
They are not, and cannot be looked on as a whole. 
Many were written independently, and then fitted 
into the framework of the Prologue in 1388. At 
that time a number more were written, and the 
rest added at intervals till his death. In fact, the 
whole thing was done much in the same way as Mr. 
Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The 
manner in which he knitted them together was very 
simple and likely to please English people. The 
holiday excursions of the time were the pilgrimages, 
and the most famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage 
to go, especially for Londoners, was the three or four 
days' journey to see the shrine of St. Thomas at 
Canterbury. Persons of all ranks in life met and 
travelled together, starting from a London inn. 
Chaucer seized on this as the frame in which to set 
his pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial 
host of the Tabard Inn men and women of every 
class of society in England, set them on horseback 
to ride to Canterbury, and made each of them tell a 
tale. No one could hit off a character better, and in 



II.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 39 

his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, 
the whole of the new, vigorous English society which 
had grown up since Edward I. is painted with as- 
tonishing vividness. " I see all the pilgrims in the 
Canterbury Tales,'' says Dryden, " their humours, their 
features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if I had 
supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark." 
The Tales themselves take in the whole range of the 
poetry of the middle ages ; the legend of the samt, 
the romance of the Knight, the wonderful fables 
of the traveller, the coarse tale of common life, 
the love story, the allegory, the satirical lay, and 
the apologue. And they are pure tales. He has 
been said to have had dramatic power, but he has 
none. He is simply our greatest story-teller in 
verse. All the best tales are told easily, sincerely, with 
great grace, and yet with so much homeliness, that 
a child would understand them. Sometimes his 
humour is broad, sometimes sly, sometimes gay, 
sometimes he brings tears into our eyes, and he can 
make us smile or be sad as he pleases. 

He had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and 
the tale and the verse go together like voice and music. 
Indeed, so softly flowing and bright are they, that to 
read them is like Hstenmg in a meadow full of sun- 
shine to a clear stream rippling over its bed of 
pebbles. The English in which they are written is 
almost the English of our time ; and it is hterary 
English. Chaucer made our tongue into a true means 
of poetry. He did more, he welded together the 
French and English elements in our language and 
made them into one EngHsh tool for the use of 
literature, and all our prose writers and poets derive 
their tongue from the language of the Canterbury 
Tales, They give him honour for this, but still 
more for that he was the first English artist. Poetry 
is an art, and the artist in poetry is one who writes 
for pure pleasure and for nothing else the thing he 



40 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap 

writes, and who desires to give to others the same 
fine pleasure by his poems which he had in writing 
them. The thing he most cares about is that the 
form in which he puts his thoughts or feehngs may 
be perfectly fitting to the subject, and as beauti- 
ful as possible — but for this he cares very greatly ; and 
in this Chaucer stands apart from the other poets of 
his time. Gower wrote with a moral object, and 
nothing can be worse than the form in which he puts 
his tales. The author of Piers the Plounnaii wrote 
with the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical 
affairs, and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer 
wrote because he was full of emotion and joy in his 
own thoughts, and thought that others would weep 
and be glad with him, and the only time he ever 
moralizes is in the tales of the Yeoman and the 
Manciple, written in his decay. He has, then, the best 
right to the poet's name. He is our first English artist. 
40. Mandeville. — I have already noticed the prose 
of Wyclif under the religious class of English work. 
I have kept Sir John Mandeville for this place, 
because he belongs to light literature. He is called 
our *^ first writer in formed English." Chaucer him- 
self however wrote some things, and especially one 
of his Tales, in rhythmical prose, and John of 
Trevisa translated into English prose, 1387, Higden's 
Folychronicon, Mandeville wrote his Iravels first 
in Latin, then in French, and finally put them into 
our tongue about 1356, "that every man of the 
nation might understand them." His quaint dehght 
in teUing his "traveller's tales,'' and sometimes the 
grace with which he tells them, rank him among the 
story-tellers of England. 



III.] FROM CHAUCER 10 ELIZABETH. 41 

CHAPTER III. 

FROM CHAUCER, 1400, TO ELIZABETH, 1559- 

Thomas Occleve (Henry V.'s reign) ; J. Lydgate, Falls of Princes 
(in Henry VI.). — Sir John Fortescue's prose work, and Sir T. 
Malory's Morte d' Arthur (Edward IV.). — Caxton^s prints at 
Westminster,1477.—Paston Letters, 1422— 1505-—Hawes' 
Pastime of Pleasure, 1506- — ^John Skelton's poems, 1508 — 
1529.— Sir T. More's History of Richard IIP, 1513.— 
Tyndale's Translation of the Bible, 1525- — English Praye*^ 
Book, 1549. — Ascham's Toxophilus, 1545- — Poems of 
Wyatt and Surrey, in TotteVs Miscellany, 1557- 

Scottish Poetry, begins with Barbour's i^r^/^^, 1375-7 ; James 
I.'s King's Quhair, 1424. — T. Henryson dies, 1508- — Dun- 
bar's Thistle and Rose, 3503. — Gawin Douglas dies, 1522- — 
Sir D. Lyndsay born, 1490 J Satire oj Three Estates^ 1536 ; 
dies 1555. 

41. The Fifteenth Century Prose.— The last 
poems of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 
the year 1400. The century that followed is the most 
barren in our literature. History sank down into a 
few Latin chroniclers, of whom Thor7ias of Walsing- 
ham is best known. Two Rimi^ig Chronicles were 
written in Henry V.'s time by Andrew of Wyntoun, 
a Scotchman, and John Harding, an Englishman. 
John Capgrave wrote in Enghsh, in Edward IV. 's 
reign, a Chronicle of England which began with 
the Creation. Political prose is then represented 
by Sir John Fortescue's book on the Difference 
between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, It is our 
second important book in the history of English 
prose. The religious war between the Lollards 
and the Church went on during the reign of 
Henry V. and VL, and in the reign of the latter, 
Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely 
English. He fought the Lollards with their own 



42 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

weapons, with public sermons in English, and with 
tracts in English; and after 1449, when Bishop of 
Chichester, published his work, The Repressor oj 
overmuch Blammg of the Clergy, It pleased neither 
party. The Lollards disliked it because it defended the 
customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen 
burnt it because it agreed with the *' Bible-men,'' that 
the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured 
it because it said that doctrines were to be proved 
from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the 
Church theologians who wrote in English, and the 
book is a fine example of our early prose. 

42. Poetical Literature. — The only hterature 
which reached any strength was poetical, but even that 
is almost wholly confined to the reign of Henry VI. 
The new day of poetry still went on, but its noon 
in Chaucer was now succeeded by the grey afternoon 
of Lydgate, and the dull twilight of Occleve. John 
Lydgate, a monk of Bury, who was thirty years of age 
when Chaucer died, wrote nothing of importance 
till Henry VI. 's reign. Though a long-winded and 
third-rate poet, he was a delightful man ; fresh, 
natural, and happy even to his old age when he 
recalls himself as a boy, ^Sveeping for nought, 
and anon after glad." There was scarcely any 
literary work he could not do. He rimed history, 
ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. 
He made pageants for Henry VI., masks and 
May-games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord 
Mayor, and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. 
Educated at Oxford, a traveller in France and Italy, 
he knew all the literature of his time, and he even 
dabbled in the sciences. He enjoyed everything, and 
if the Flower and the Leaf usually attributed to 
Chaucer, be by him, it proves that which his other 
poems confirm, that he was as much a lover of nature 
as Chaucer. It is his story-telling which brings 
him closest to Chaucer. His three chief poems 



III.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 43 

were the Falls of Princes^ The Storie of Thebes^ and 
the Troye Book. The first is a translation of a book 
of Boccaccio's. It tells the tragic fates of great men 
from the time of Adam to the capture of King John of 
France, at Poitiers. There is a touch of the drama 
in the plan, which was suggested by the pageants of 
the time. The dead princes appear before Boccaccio, 
pensive in his library, and each relates his downfall. 
The Storie of Thebes is an additional Canterbury 
Tale, and the Troye Book is a version from the French 
of the prose romance of Guido della Colonna, a Sicilian 
poet, if the book be not in truth originally French. 
The Complaint of the Black Kiiight^ usually given 
to Chaucer, is stated to be Lydgate's by Shirley, the 
contemporary of him and Chaucer. I should like to 
be able to call him the author of the pretty little poem 
called the Cuckoo and the Nightingale^ included in 
Chaucer's works. But its authorship is unknown. 

Thomas Occleve, who wrote chiefly in Henry V.'s 
reign, about 1420, was nothing but a bad versifier. 
His one merit is that he loved Chaucer. With his 
loss "the whole land smartith," he says, and he 
breaks out into a kind of rapture once : — 

** Thou wert acquainted with Chaucer ! Pardie, 
God save his soul, 
The first finder of our faire langage." 

And it is in the MS. of his longest poem. The 
Governail of Princes that he caused to be drawn, with 
*' fond idolatry," the portrait of his master. With this 
long piece of verse we mark the decay of the poetry of 
England. Romances and lays were still translated ; 
there were verses written on such subjects as hunting 
and alchemy. Caxton himself produced a poem ; but 
the only thing here worth noticing is that at the end 
of the century some of our ballads were printed. 

43. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been 
sung in England from the earliest times, and popular 



44 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces to be 
accompanied by music and dancing. We have seen 
war celebrated in Minot's songs, and the political ballad 
is represented by the lampoon made by some follower 
of Simon de Montfort, on the day of the battle of Lewes, 
and by the Elegy 07i Edivard I.^s Death. But the ballad 
went over the whole land among the people. The trader, 
the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, 
had their own songs. They tended to collect them- 
selves round some legendary name like Robin Hood, 
or some historical character made legendary, like 
Randolf, Earl of Chester. Sloth, in Piers Plowman's 
Vision^ does not know his paternoster, but he does 
know the rimes of these heroes. A crowd of min- 
strels sang them through city and village. The very 
friar sang them ^* and made his Englissch swete upon 
his tunge." A collection of Robin Hood ballads 
was soon printed under the title of A Lytel Geste of 
Robin Hood^ by Wynken de Worde. The Nict Bj'owji 
Maid, The Battle of Otterbnrn, and Cheijy Chase, may 
belong to the end of the century, though probably not 
in the form we possess them. It was not however till 
much later that any collection of ballads was made ; 
and few, as we possess them, can be dated farther back 
than the reign of Elizabeth. 

44. Growth of interest in Literature. — This 
was then the literature of this century. Little creative 
work was done, and that little v/as poor. There 
was small learning in the monasteries, and few books 
were wTitten. But a good deal of interest in litera- 
ture was scattered about the country, and it increased as 
the century went on. The Wars of the Roses stopped 
the writing, but not the reading, of books. We have 
in the Paston Letters, 142 2- 1505 — the correspondence 
of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry VIL, 
pleasantly, even correctly written — passages which 
refer to translations of the classics, and to manuscripts 
being sent to and fro for reading. Henry "VL, 



m.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 45 

Edward IV., and some of the great nobles were 
lovers of books. Men like Duke Humphrey of 
Gloucester made libraries and brought over Italian 
scholars to England to translate Greek vi^orks. There 
were fine scholars in England, like John Lord Tip toft, 
Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the schools 
of Italy. Before 1474, when Caxton finished the first 
book said to have been printed in this country, The 
Game and Playe of the Chesse, a number of French 
translations of the Latin authors were widely read. 
There was, therefore, in England, a general, though 
an uninformed interest in the ancient writers. 

45. First Influence of the Italian RevivaL — 
Such an interest v/as added to by the revival of 
letters which arose at this time in Italy, and the 
sixteenth century had not long begun before many 
EngHshmen went to Italy to read and study the 
old Greek authors on whom the scholars driven 
from Constantinople by the Turks were lecturing 
in the schools of Florence. Printing enabled 
these men on their return to turn the classic books 
they loved into English for the English people. 
We began to do our own work as translators ; 
and from the time of Henry VIII. onwards, 
there is scarcely any literary fury equal to that with 
which the young English scholars fell upon the 
ancient authors and tilled the land with English 
versions of them It is, then, in the slow upgrowth 
during this century of interest in and study of the 
ancients that we are to see the gathering together at 
its source of one of the streams which fed that great 
river of Elizabethan literature which it is so* great a 
mistake to think burst suddenly up through the earth. 

46. Influence of Caxton's Work. — Wc find 
another of these sources in the work of our first 
printer, William Caxton. The first book that bears 
the inscription : *^ Imprynted by me, WilHam Cax- 
ton, at Westmynstre '' is The Dictes and Sayings of 



46 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

Philosophers. Caxton did little or nothing for classical 
learning. His translation of the yEneid of Vergil is 
from a contemptible French romance. But he pre- 
served for us Chaucer, and Lydgate, and Gower, with 
zealous care. He printed the Chronicles of Brut 
and Higden ; he translated the Golden Legend; and 
the Morte d' Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory 
in the reign of Edward IV., and one of our finest and 
simplest examples of early prose, was printed by him 
with all the care of one who loved ''the noble acts of 
chivalry." He had a tradesman's interest in pubHsh- 
ing the romances, for they were the reading of the 
day, but he could scarcely have done better for the 
interests of the coming literature. These books 
nourished the imagination of England, and supplied 
poet after poet with fine subjects for work, or fine 
frames for their subjects. He had not a tradesman's, 
but a loving literary interest in printing the old 
English poets ; and in sending them out from his press 
Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. 
The poets after him at once began on the models 
of Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books 
themselves, being more widely read, not only made 
poets but a public that loved poetry. If classic 
literature then was one of the sources in this century 
of the Elizabethan literature, the recovery of old 
English poetry was another. 

47. Prose Literature. — With the exception of 
Caxton's work all the good prose of the fifteenth 
century was written before the death of Edward IV. 
The reigns of Richard III. and of Henry VII. pro- 
duced no prose of any value, but the country 
awakened from its dulness with the accession of 
Henry VIII. , 1509. A band of new scholars who 
had studied in Italy taught Greek in Oxford, Cam- 
bridge and London. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, 
with John Lilly, the grammarian, set on foot a school 
where the classics were taught in a new and practical 



III.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 47 

way. Erasmus, who had all the enthusiasm which 
sets others on fire, came to England, and with 
Grocyn, Linacre, Sir Thomas More, and Archbishop 
Warham formed a centre from which a liberal and 
wise theology was spread. The new learning which 
had been born in Italy came to England. It 
stirred and gave life to everything, and it woke up 
English Prose from its sleep. Much of the new life 
of EngHsh Literature was due to the patronage of the 
young king. It was Henry VIII. who supported 
Sir Thomas Elyot, and encouraged him to write 
books in the vulgar tongue that he might delight his 
countrymen. It was the king who asked Lord Berners 
to translate Froissart, a book which "made a landmark 
in our tongue," and who made Leland, our first Enghsh 
writer on antiquarian subjects, the "King's Antiquary." 
It was the king to whom Roger Ascham dedicated 
his first work, 1545, and the king sent him abroad to 
pursue his studies. This book, the Toxophilus^ or the 
School of Shootings 1545, was written for the pleasure of 
the yeomen and gentlemen of England in their own 
tongue. Ascham apologizes for this, and the apology 
marks the state of Enghsh prose. "Everything has 
been done excellently in Greek and Latin, but in the 
English tongue so meanly that no man can do worse.' 
He has done his work well, and in quaint but charm- 
ing English. 

48. Prose and the Reformation. — But the 
man who did best in English prose was Sir Thomas 
More in our earliest English history, the History of 
Edward V. and Richard III, The simplicity of his 
genius showed itself in the style, and his wit in the 
picturesque method and the dramatic dialogue that 
graced the book. English prose grew larger and richer 
under his pen, and began that stately step which fu- 
ture historians followed. The work is said to have been 
written in 1513 but it was not printed till 1557. The 
most famous book More wrote, The Utopia^ was not 



^8 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

written in English. The most famous controversy he 
had was with John Tyndale, a man who in his trans- 
lation of the New Testament^ ^S^S, "fixed our tongue 
once for all." His style was as purely English as 
More's, and of what kind it was may be read in our 
Bibles, for our authorized version is still in great 
part his translation. In this work Tyndale was 
assisted by William Roy, a runaway friar, and his 
friend Rogers, the first martyr in Queen Mary's reign, 
added to it a translation of the Apocrypha^ and made 
up what was wanting in Tyndale's translation from 
Chronicles to Malachi out of Coverdale's translation. 
It was this Bible which, revised by Coverdale and 
edited and re-edited as CromweWs Bible, iS39> ^^^ 
again as Cranmer's Bible, 1540? was set up in every 
parish church in England. It got north into Scotland 
and made the Lowland English more like the London 
English, and after its revisal in 161 1 went with the 
Puritan fathers to New England and fixed the 
standard of English in America. There is no book 
which has had so great an influence on the style of 
English literature. In Edward VI.'s reign also Cran- 
mer edited the Englisii Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its 
English is a good deal mixed with Latin words, and 
its style is sometimes weak and.heavy, but on the whole 
it is a fine example of stately prose. Latimer, on the 
contrary, whose Sermon on tlie PlougJiers and others 
were delivered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain, 
shrewd style, which by its humour and rude directness 
made him the first preacher of his day. 

49. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under 
the Influence of Chaucer. — We shall speak in this 
section only of the poets in England whose work was 
due to the publication of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate 
by Caxton, and go back also to the Scotch poetry which 
owed itself to the impulse of Chaucer. After a short 
revival that influence died, and a new one entered 
from Italy into English verse iii the poems of Surrey 



III.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 49 

and Wyatt. The transition period between the one 
influence and the other is of great interest. We see 
how the old poets had been neglected by the way in 
which the new poets speak of them, as of something 
wonderful, and by the indignant reproach a man like 
Hawes makes when he says that people care for nothing 
but ballads, and will not read these old books. But 
the reproach was unwise. It is better to make a new 
ballad than to read an old poem, and the ballads of 
England kept up the original vein of poetry of the 
land. It is one of the signs of a new poetic life in a 
nation when it is fond of poetry which, like the ballad, 
has to do with the human interests of the present: and 
when that kind of human poetry pleases the upper 
classes as well as the lower a resurrection of poetry is 
at hand. 

50. Hawes and Skelton. — At such a time we 
are likely to find imitators of the old work, and in the 
reign of Henry VII. Stephen Hawes recast a poem 
of Lydgate's (?) The Temple of Glass, and imitated 
Chaucer's work and the old allegory in his Fastme 
of Pleasure, 1506. We shall also find men who, 
while they still follow the old, leave it for an ori- 
ginal line, because they are more moved by human 
life in the present than in the past. Their work will 
be popular, it may even resemble the form of the 
ballad. Such a man was John Skelton, who wrote 
in Henry VII. and Henry VIII.'s reign, and died 
1529. His earliest poems were after the manner of 
Chaucer, but he soon took a manner of his own, and 
being greatly excited by the cry of the people for Church 
reformation, wrote a bitter satire on Wolsey for his 
pride, and on the clergy for their luxury. His poem 
IV/iy come ye not to Cowtl was a fierce satire on the 
great Cardinal. That of Colin Clout was also the 
cry of the country Colin, and of the Clout or me- 
chanic of the town against the corruption of the 
Church. Both are written in short " rude rayling 



50 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

rimes, pleasing only the popular ear/' and Skelton 
chose them for that purpose. Both have a rough, 
impetuous power ; their language is coarse, full even 
of slang, but Skelton could use any language he 
pleased. He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus 
calls him the " glory and light of English letters," and 
Caxton says that he improved our language. Colin 
CloiU represents the whole popular feeling of the time 
just before the movement of the Reformation took a 
new turn by the opposition of the Pope to Henry's 
divorce. It was not only in this satirical vein that 
Skelton wrote. We owe to him some pretty and new 
love lyrics ; and the Boke of Phyllyp Sparoive, which 
tells the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the 
death of her sparrow, is one of the gayest and most 
inventive poems in the language. Skelton stands quite 
alone between the last flicker of the influence of 
Chaucer, whose last true imitator he was, and the rise 
of a new Italian influence in England in the poems of 
Surrey and Wyatt. In his own special work he was 
entirely original, and standing thus between two periods 
of poetry, he is a kind of landmark in English litera- 
ture. The Ship of Fooles^ 1508, by Barclay is of this 
time, but it has no value. It is a recast of a work 
published at Basel, and was popular because it at- 
tacked the follies and questions of the time. It was 
written in Chaucer's stanza. But far better work in 
poetry was being done at this time in Scotland than 
in England. 

SCOTTISH POETRY. 

51. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the 
EngHsh tongue by men living in Scotland. These 
men though calling themselves Scotchmen are of 
good English blood. But the blood, as I think, was 
mixed with an infusion of Celtic blood. 

Old Northumbria extended from the Humber to 



ra.J FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 51 

the Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western 
border a line of unconquered land, which took in 
Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland in our 
England, and over the border most of the western 
country between the Clyde and Sol way Firth. This 
unconquered country was the Welsh kingdom of 
Strathclyde, and it was dwelt in by the Celtic race. 
The present English part of it was soon conquered 
and the Celts driven out. But in the part to the north 
of the Solway Firth the Celts were not driven out. 
They remained, lived with the Englishmen w^ho were 
settled over the old Northumbria, inter-married with 
them and became imder Scot kings one mixed 
people. Literature in the Lowlands then would have 
Celtic elements in it ; literature in England was 
purely Teutonic. The one sprang from a mixed, the 
other from an unmixed race. I draw attention to this, 
because it seems to me to account for certain peculi- 
arities in Scottish poetry which colour the whole of it, 
which rule over it, and are specially Celtic. 

52. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. — 
The first of these is the love of wild nature for its 
own sake. There is a passionate, close, and poetical 
observation and description of natural scenery in 
Scotland from the earliest times of its poetry, such 
as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of 
Wordsworth. The second is the love of colotu\ All 
early Scottish poetry differs from English in the extra- 
ordinary way in which colour is insisted on, and at 
times in the lavish exaggeration of it. The third 
is the wittier^ more 7'ollicking Jmviour in the Scottish 
poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with that 
humour which has its root in sadness and which 
belongs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really 
more different than the humour of Chaucer and the 
humour of Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and 
the humour of Burns. These are the special Celtic 
elements in the Lowland poetry. 



52 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

53. Its National Elements came into it from 
the circumstances under which Scotland rose into 
a separate kingdom. The first of these is the strong, 
almost fierce assertion of national life. The Eng- 
lish were as national as the Scots, and felt the 
emotion of patriotism as strongly. But they had no 
need to assert it ; they were not oppressed. But for 
nearly forty years the Scotch resisted for their very life 
the efforts of England to conquer them. And the 
war of freedom left its traces on their poetry from 
Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott in the almost 
obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish liberty, 
and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their verse. 
Their passionate nationality appears in another form 
in their descriptive poetry. The natural description 
of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not dis- 
tinctively English. But in Scotland it is always the 
scenery of their own land that the poets describe. 
Even when they are imitating Chaucer, they do 
not imitate his conventional landscape. They put 
in a Scotch landscape, and in the work of such men 
as Gawin Douglas the love of Scotland and the love 
of nature mingle their influences together to make 
him sit down, as it were, to paint, with his eye on 
everything he paints, a series of Scotch landscapes. 
It is done without any artistic composidon ; it reads 
like a catalogue, but it is work which stands quite 
alone at the time he wrote. There is nothing even 
resembling it in England for centuries after. 

54. Its Individual Element. — There is one 
more special element in early Scottish poetry which 
arose, I think, out of its political circumstances. 
All through the struggle for freedom, carried on 
as it was at first by small bands under separate 
leaders till they all came together under a leader 
like Bruce, a much greater amount of individuahty, 
and a greater habit of it, was created among the 
Scotch than among the English. Men fought for 



liL] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETIL 53 

their own land and lived in their own way. Every 
little border chieftain, almost every border farmer 
was or felt himself to be his own master. The 
poets would be likely to share in this individual 
quality, and in spite of the overpowering influence of 
Chaucer, to strike out new veins of poetic thought and 
new methods of poetic expression. And this is what 
happened. Long before forms of poetry like the short 
pastoral or the fable had appeared in England, the 
Scottish poets had started them. They were less docile 
imitators than the English, but their work in the new 
forms they started was not so good as the after English 
work in the same forms. 

55. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting 
Thomas of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Arch- 
deacon of Aberdeen. His long poem of The Bruce 
represents the whole of the eager struggle for 
Scottish freedom against the English which closed 
at Bannockburn; and the national spirit, which 
I have mentioned, springs in it, full grown, into 
life. But it is temperate, it does not pass into the 
fury against England which is so plain in writers 
hke Blind Harry, who, about 146 1, composed a long 
poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds 
of William Wallace, Barbour was often in England 
for the sake of study, and his patriotism though strong 
is tolerant of England. The date of his poem is 1375, 7 ; 
it never mentions Chaucer, and Barbour is the only 
early Scottish poet on whom Chaucer had no influence. 
In the next poet we find the influence of Chaucer, 
and it is hereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time. 
James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England 
for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, 
and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of 
Henry the Fourth. The poem which he wrote — 
The Kings Quhair (the quire or book) — is done in 
imitation of Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined 
stanza, which from James's use of it is called Rime 



54 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

Royal. In. six cantos, sweeter, tenderer and purer than 
any verse till we come to Spenser, he describes the be- 
ginning of his love and its happy end. " I must write, 
he says, *' so much because 1 have come so from Hell 
to Heaven." Nor did the flower of his love and 
hers ever fade. She defended him in the last ghastly 
scene of murder when his kingly life ended. There 
is something especially pathetic in the lover of 
Chaucer, in the first poet of sentiment in Scotland 
being slain so cruelly. He was no blind imitator of 
Chaucer. We are conscious at once of an original 
element in his work. The natural description is 
more varied, the colour is more vivid, and there is a 
modern self-reflective quality, a touch of spiritual feel- 
ing which does not belong to Chaucer at all. The 
poems of The Kirk on the Green and Peebles to the 
Flay have been attributed to him. If they be his, 
he originated a new vein of poetry, which Burns after- 
wards carried out — the comic and satirical ballad 
poem. But they are more likely to be by James V. 

Robert Henryson, who died before 1508, a school- 
master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, 
and his Testament of Cresseid continues Chaucer's 
Troiliis, But he set on foot two new forms of poetry. 
He made poems out of t\it fables. They differ entirely 
from the short, neat form in which Gay and La Fon- 
taine treated the fable. They are long stories, fall of 
pleasant dialogue, political allusions, and with elabo- 
rate morals attached to them. They have a pecuHar 
Scottish tang, and are full of descriptions of Scotch 
scenery. He also began the short pastoral in his 
Robin and Makyne. It is a natural, prettily turned 
dialogue ; and a subtle Celtic wit, such as charms us 
in Duncan Grey, runs through it. The individuality 
which struck out two original lines of poetic work in 
these poems appears again in his sketch of the graces 
of womanhood in the Garment of Good Ladies ; a 
poem of the same type as those thoughtful lyrics which 



III.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH, 55 

describe what is best in certain phases of professions, 
or life, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy 
Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior. 

But among lesser men, whom we need not mention, 
the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in 
fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth cen- 
tury and into the sixteenth. Few have possessed a more 
masculine genius, and its work was as varied in its 
range as it was original. He followed the form and plan 
of Chaucer in his two poems of The Thistle and the 
Rose, 1503, and The Golden l^erge, 1508, the first on the 
marriage of James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second 
an allegory of Love, Beauty, Reason, and the Poet. In 
both, though they begin with Chaucer's conventional 
May morning, the natural description becomes Scottish, 
and in both the national enthusiasm of the poet is 
strongly marked. But he soon ceased to imitate. 
The vigorous fun of the satires and the satirical 
ballads that he wrote is only matched by their coarse- 
ness, a coarseness and a fun that descended to Burns. 
Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still higher in a wild poem 
in which he personifies the seven deadly sins, and 
describes their dance, with a mixture of horror and 
humour which makes the little thing unique. 

A man almost as remarkable as Dunbar is Gawin 
Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at 
the Court of Henry VIII., and was buried in the Savoy. 
He is the author of the first metrical English transla- 
tion from the original of any Latin book. He trans- 
lated Ovid's Art of Love, and afterwards, with truth 
and spirit, the ^neid oi\trg\\, 15 13. To each book 
of the ^neidht wrote a prologue of his own. And it is 
chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish 
poets. Three of them are descriptions of the country 
in May, in autumn, and in winter. The scenery is 
altogether Scotch, and the few Chaucerisms that appear 
seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature which 
is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his early 



55 ENGLISH LITER A TURK, [chap. 

time. The colour is superb, the landscape is described 
with an excessive detail, but it is not composed by 
any art into a whole. Still it astonishes the reader, and 
it is only by bringing in the Celtic element of love of 
nature that v/e can account for the vast distance 
between work like this and contemporary work in 
England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's other original 
work, one poem, The Palace of Ho fioicr^ 1 501, continues 
the influence of Chaucer. 

There were a number of other Scottish poets 
belonging to this time who are all remembered and 
praised by Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to men- 
tion in this place, because he still connects Scottish 
poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490 and is 
the last of the old Scottish school, and the most 
popular. He is the most popular because he is not 
only the Poet, but also the Reformer. His poem The 
Dreme, 1528, connects him with Chaucer. It is in the 
manner of the old poet. But its scenery is Scottish, 
and instead of the May morning of Chaucer, it opens 
on a winter's day of wind and sleet. The place is a cave 
over the sea, whence Lyndsay sees the weltering of 
the waves. Chaucer goes to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, 
Lyndsay falls into dream as he thinks of the " false 
world's instability," wavering like the sea waves. The 
difference marks not only the difference of the two 
countries, but the different natures of the men. 
Chaucer did not care much for the popular storms 
and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. 
Lyndsay in the Dreme and in two other poems — 
the Complaint to the Kmg, and the Testament of 
the Kino's Fapyngo " — is absorbed in the evils and 
sorrows of the people, in the desire to reform the 
abuses of the Church, of the Court, of party, of the 
nobility. In 1539 his Satire of the Ihree Estates^ 
a Morality interspersed with interludes, was repre- 
sented before James V. at Linlithgow. It was first 
acted in 1535, and was a daring attack on the ignor- 



III.] FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 57 

ance, profligacy and exactions of the priesthood, on 
the vices and flattery of the favourites — " a mocking 
of abuses used in the country by diverse sorts of 
estate.'^ A still bolder poem, and one thought so 
even by himself, is the Monarchies '553? his last work. 
Reformer as he was, he was more a social and political 
than a religious one. He bears the same relation to 
Knox as Larigland did to Wiclif When he was 
sixty-five years old he saw the fruits of his work. 
Ecclesiastical councils met to reform the Church. 
But the reform soon went beyond his temperate 
wishes. In 1557 the Reformation in Scotland was 
fairly launched when in December the Congregation 
signed the Bond of Association. Lyndsay had died 
three years before; he is as much the reformer as he 
is the poet, of a transition time. '^ Still his verse 
hath charms," but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. 
He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much 
preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in 
plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than 
the rest of his fellows, and he lived an active, bold 
and brave life in a very stormy time. 

56. Italian Influence : Wyatt and Surrey. — 
While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an 
instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close 
of Henry VIH.'s reign in Sir Thomas Wyatt and the 
Earl of Surrey. They were both Italian travellers, 
and in bringing back to England the inspiration 
they had gained from Petrarca they re-made Eng- 
lish poetry. They are our first really modern poets ; 
the first who have anything of the modern man- 
ner. Though Italian in sentiment, their language 
is more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use 
fewer romance words. They handed down this 
purity of English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville, 
Spenser, and Shakespeare. They introduced a new 
kind of poetry, the amourist poetry. The '* amourists," 
as they are called, were poets who composed a series of 



58 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

poems on the subject of love — sonnets mingled with 
lyrical pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and in 
accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. The 
Hundred Passions of Watson, the sonnets of Sidney, 
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drummond, are all poems 
of this kind and the same impulse in a changed form 
appears in later literature, in the poems of Herrick and 
his school. The subjects of Wyatt and Surrey were 
chiefly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated the same 
model has made some likeness between them. Like 
their personal characters, however, the poetry of Wyatt 
is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, but 
Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a livelier fancy. 
Both did this great thing for English verse — they chose 
an exquisite model, and in imitating it " corrected 
the ruggedness of English poetry." Such verse as 
Skelton's became impossible. A new standard was 
made below which the after poets could not fall. 
They also added new stanza measures to English 
verse, and enlarged in this way the " lyrical range." 
Surrey was the first, in his U-ansIation of Vergirs 
JE,neid to use the ten-syllabled, unrimed verse, which 
we now call blank verse. In his hands it is 
not worthy of praise ; it had neither the true form nor 
harmony into which it grew afterwards. Sackville, 
Lord Buckhurst, introduced it into drama ; Marlowe, 
in his Tambtcrlame^ made it the proper verse of the 
drama, and Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Massinger 
used it splendidly. In plays it has a special manner 
of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, not 
only created but perfected by Milton. 

The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but 
arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the 
reigns of Edward VL and Mary, and all the work of 
the New Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas 
Wilson's book in English on Rhetoric and Logic in 
1553, and the publication of Thos. Tusser's Fointesof 
Hiisbandrie and of Tottel's Miscellany of Uncertai?i 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 59 

Authors, 1557? i^ the last years of Mary's reign, 
proved that something was stirring beneath the gloom. 
The latter book contained the poems of Surrey and 
Wyatt, and others by Grimald, by Lord Vaux, 
and Lord Eerners. The date should be remembered, 
for it is the first printed book of modern English 
poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new 
than the old poets, that the time of imitation of 
Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun. 
It ushers in the EHzabethan Uterature. 



CHAPTER IV. 
FROM 1559 to 1603. 

Sackville's Mii^ror of Magistrates, 1559- — Lyiy's Euphues. — 
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, 1579- — Sidney's Arcadia, 
1580. — Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594. — Bacon's 
Essays, 1597- — Spenser born, 1552; Faerie Quern, 1590- 
1595 ; died, 1598— W. Warner's, S, Daniel's, M. Dray- 
ton's historical poems, 1595-1598. — Sir J. Davies's and 
Lord Brooke's philosophical poetiis, 15 9 9-1620- 

The Dra7na,—Yvc^\. Miracle Play, 1120-— Interludes of T. 
Heywood, 1533. — First English Comedy, 1540- — First 
English Tragedy, 1562.— First English Theatre, 1576-— 
Marlowe's Tamburlaine, 1587. — Shakespeare born, 1564; 
Love's Labour'' s Lost, 1588; Merchant of Venice, 1596 ; 
Hamlet, 1602; Cymbehne, 1610; Henry VIIL, 1613; 
died, 3616- — Ben Jonson begins work, 1596; dies, 
1637.— Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Webster's first play, 1612- — Massinger begins, 1620; dies, 
1640.— John Ford's first play, 1628.— James Shirley, last 
Elizabethan Dramatist, lives to 1666 ; Theatre closed, 
1642 ; opens again, 1656. 

57. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature, 
may be said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But 
as their poems were published the year before Eliza- 
beth came to the throne, we date the beginning of the 



6o ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

early period oi Elizabethan literature from the year of 
her accession, 1559. That period lasted till ij79, 
and was followed by the great literary outburst, as it 
has been called, of the days of Spenser and Shake- 
speare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst has 
been an object of wonder. Men have searched for 
its causes, chiefly in the causes which led to the revival 
of learning, and no doubt these bore on England 
as they did on the whole of Europe. But we shall 
best seek its nearest causes in the work done during 
the early years of Elizabeth, and in doing so we 
shall find that the outburst was not so sudden after 
all It was preceded by a very various, plentiful, but 
inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and 
prose-writing w^ere tried and new veins of thought 
opened, which were afterwards wrought out fully and 
splendidly. All the germs of the coming age are to 
be found in these twenty years. The outburst of a 
plant into flower seems sudden, but the whole growth 
of the plant has caused it, and the flowering of 
Elizabethan literature was the slow result of the 
growth of the previous literature and the influences 
that bore upon it. 

58. First Elizabethan Period, IS59-I579-— 
(i.) The only literary prose of this time is that of the 
iV/^^/^/f/^j-^^r of AscHAM, published 1570. This book, 
which is on education, is the work of the scholar of 
the New Learning of the time of Henry VIII. who 
has lived on into another time. It is not, properly 
speaking, Elizabethan, it is like a stranger in a new 
land and among new manners. 

(2,) Poetry is first represented by Sackville Lord 
Buckhurst. ^\v^ Mirror of Magistrates, 1559, for which 
he wrote the Indiidioii and one tale, is a poem on 
the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes, already 
imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets, along with 
Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is the 
only one of any value. The Induction paints the 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 61 

poet's descent into Avernus, and his meeting with 
Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he 
tells with a grave and inventive imagination. Being 
written in the manner and stanza of the elder poets, 
this poem has been called the transition between 
Lydgate and Spenser. But it does not truly belong 
to the old time ; it is as modern as Spenser. George 
Gascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas, 1576, is our 
first long satirical poem, is the best among a crowd 
of lesser poets who came after Sackville, They 
wrote legends, pieces on the wars and discoveries of 
the Englishmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, 
songs, sonnets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ; 
and the best things they did were collected in a 
miscellany called the Paradise of Dahity Devices, in 
1576. This book, with Tottel's, set on foot in the 
later years of Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies 
of poetry which were of great use to the poets. 
Lyrical poetry, and that which we may call " occa- 
sional poetry," was now fairly started. 

(3.) Frequent traiislations were now made from the 
classical writers. We know the names of more than 
twelve men who did this work, and there must have 
been many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and 
Edward VI. 's time, ancient authors had been m.ade 
English; and before 1579, Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, 
Demosthenes, and many Greek and Latin plays 
were translated. In this way the best models were 
brought before the English people, and it is in the 
influence of the spirit of Greek and Roman literature 
on literary form and execution that we are to find 
one of the vital causes of the greatness of the later 
Elizabethan literature. 

(4.) Theological reform stirred men to another 
kind of literary work. A great number of satirical 
ballads, and pamphlets, and plays issued every year 
from obscure presses and filled the land. Poets like 
George Gascoigne, and still more Barnaby Googe, 



62 ENGLISH LITERATURE, lchap. 

represent in their work the hatred the young men had 
of the old rehgious system. It was a spirit which did 
not do much for literature, but it quickened the 
habit of composition, and it made it easier. The Bible 
also became common property, and its language 
glided into all theological writing and gave it a literary 
tone; while the pubHcation of John Fox's Acts and 
Monuments or Book of Martyrs,, 1563, gave to the 
people all over England a book which, by its simple 
style, the ease of its story-telling, and its popular 
charm made the very peasants who heard it read 
feel what is meant by literature. 

(5.) The love of stories again awoke. The old 
English tales and ballads were eagerly read and 
collected. Italian Tales by various authors were 
translated and sown so broadcast over London by 
William Painter in his collection The Palace of 
Pleasure 1566, by George Turbervile and others, that 
it is said they were to be bought at every bookstall. 
A great number of subjects for prose a.nd poetry 
were thus made ready for literary men, and fiction 
became possible in EngHsh literature. 

(6.) The history of the country and its manners was 
not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote 
steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. 
Grafton, Stow, Holinshed and others, at least sup- 
plied materials for the study and use of the historical 
drama. 

(7.) The masques^ pageants^ interludes, and plays 
that were written at this time, are scarcel}^ to be 
counted. At every great ceremonial, whenever the 
queen made a progress, or visited one of the great 
lords or a university ; at the houses of the nobility, 
and at the court on all important days, some obscure 
versifier, or a young scholar at the Inns of Court, at 
Oxford or at Cambridge, produced a masque or a 
pageant, or wrote or translated a play. The habit of 
play-writing became common ; a kind of school, one 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 63 

might almost say a manufacture of plays arose, which 
partly accounts for the rapid production, the excellence, 
and the multitude of plays that we find after 1579. Re- 
presented all over England, these masques, pageants, 
and dramas were seen by the people who were thus 
accustomed to take an interest though of an unedu- 
cated kind in the larger drama that was to follow. 
The literary men on the other hand ransacked, in 
order to find subjects and scenes for their pageants, 
ancient and medieval and modern literature, and 
many of them in doing so became fine scholars. The 
imagination of England was quickened and educated 
in this way, and as Biblical stories were also largely 
used, the images of oriental life were added to the 
materials of imagination. 

(8.) Another influence bore on literature. It was 
that given by the stories of the voyagers^ who in the 
new commercial activity of the country, penetrated 
into strange lands. Before 1579, books had been pub- 
lished on the north-west passage. Frobisher had made 
his voyages and Drake had started, to return in 1580 
to amaze all England with the story of his sail round 
the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. We 
may trace everywhere in Elizabethan literature the 
impression made by the wonders told by the sailors 
and captains who explored and fought from the 
North Pole to the Southern Seas. 

(9.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large 
number of pei^soiis writing who did not publish their 
7vorks. It was considered at this time, that to write 
for the public injured a man, and unless he were 
driven by poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But 
things were changed when a great genius like Spenser 
took the* world by storm ; when Lyly's Euphues en- 
chanted the whole of court society; when a great 
gentleman like Sir Philip Sidney became a writer. 
Literature was made the fashion, and the disgrace 
being taken from it, the production became enormous. 



64 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [chap. 

Manuscripts written and laid by were at once sent 
forth ; and when the rush began it grew by its own 
force. Those who had previously been kept from 
writing by its unpopularity now took it up eagerly, 
and those who had written before wrote twice as 
much now. The great improvement also in literary 
quality is easily accounted for by this — that men 
strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, and 
that a wider and sharper criticism arose. 

59. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's 
Reign, 1579-1602, begins with the publication of Lyly's 
Euphues and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender^ both in 
1579, and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Arca- 
dia and his Defence of Foetrie, 1580-81. It will be best 
to leave the poem of Spenser aside till w^e come to write 
of the poets. The Euphues and the Arcadia carried 
on the story-telling literature ; the Defence of Poetrie 
created a new form of literature, that of criticism. 

The Eicphues was the work of John Lyly, poet and 
dramatist. It is in two parts, EicpJmes and Euphues' 
England. In six years it ran through five editions, so 
great was its popularity. Its prose style is too poetic, 
but it is admirable for its smoothness and charm, 
and its very faults were of use in softening the rude- 
ness of previous prose. The story is long and is 
more a loose framework into which Lyly could fit his 
thoughts on love, friendship, education and religion 
than a true story. The second part is made up of 
several stories in one, and is a picture of the English- 
man abroad. It made its mark because it fell in with 
all the fantastic and changeable life of the time. Its 
far-fetched conceits, its extravagance of gallantry, its 
endless metaphors from the classics and natural history, 
its curious and gorgeous descriptions of dress and its 
pale imitation of chivalry were all reflected in the life 
and talk and dress of the court of Elizabeth. It became 
the fashion to talk " Euphuism," and, like the Utopia 
of More, it has created an English word. 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 65 

The Arcadia was the work of Sir PHiLrp Sidney, 
and though written in 1530, did not appear till 
after his death. It is more poetic in style than the 
Euphiies^ and Sidney himself, as he wrote it under the 
trees of Wilton, would have called it a poem. It is 
less the image of the time than of the man. Most 
people know that bright and noble figure, the friend of 
Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the old knights, 
the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, wounded 
to the death, gave up the cup of water to a dying 
soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of the 
Arcadia^ in the first two books and part of the third, 
which alone were written by him. It is a romance 
mixed up with pastoral stories, after the fashion of the 
Spanish romances. The characters are real, but the 
story is confused by endless digressions. The senti- 
ment is too fine and delicate for the world. The de- 
scriptions are picturesque and the sentences made as 
perfect as possible. A quaint or poetic thought or an 
epigram appear in every line. There is no real art in it, 
or in its prose. But it is so full of poetry that it be- 
came a mine into which poets dug for subjects. 

60. Criticism began with Sidney^s Art of Foetrie. 
Its style shows us that he felt how faulty the prose of 
the Arcadia was. The book made a new step in the 
creation of a dignified English prose. It is still too 
flowery, but in it the fantastic prose of his own Arcadia 
and of the Euphiies dies. As criticism it is chiefly 
concerned with poetry. It defends, against Stephen 
Gosson's School of Abiise^ in which poetry and plays 
were attacked fi'om the Puritan point of view, the nobler 
uses of poetry. Sackville, Surrey and Spenser are 
praised, and the other poets made little of in its pages. 
It was followed by Webbe's Discourse of English 
Foetrie written " to stirre up some other of meet 
abiUtie to bestow travell on the matter." Already the 
other was travailing, and the Arte of English Foesie, 
supposed to be written by George Puttenham, was 



66 ENGLISH LI TERA TURE. [ch ap. 

published in 1589. It is the most elaborate book on 
the whole subject in Elizabeth's reign, and it marks 
the strong interest now taken in poetry in the highest 
. society that the author says he writes it " to help the 
courtiers and the gentlewomen of the court to write 
good poetry, that the art may become vulgar for all 
EngUshmen's use." 

61. Later Theological Literature.— Before we 
come to the Poetry we will give an account of the Prose 
into which the tendencies of the earlier years of Eliza- 
beth grew. The first is that of theology. For a long 
time it reniained only a literature of pamphlets. Puri- 
tanism in its attack on the stage, and in the Martin 
Marprelate controversy upon episcopal government 
in the Church, flooded England with small books. 
Lord Bacon even joined in the latter controversy, and 
Nash the dramatist made himself famous in the war 
by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Over this 
troubled sea rose at last the stately work of Richard 
Hooker. It was in 1594 that the first four books 
of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defence of 
the Church against the Puritans, were given to the 
world. Before his death he finished the other four. 
The book has remained ever since a standard work. 
It is as much moral and political as theological. Its 
style is grave, clear, and often musical. He adorned 
it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with 
temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric whh 
which he often concludes an argument is kept for its 
right place. On the whole it is the first monument of 
splendid literary prose that we possess. 

62. The Essay. — We may place alongside of it, as 
the other great prose work of Elizabeth's later time, the 
development of the Essay in Lord Bacon's Essays 
1597. Their highest literary merit is their combina- 
tion of charm and even of poetic prose with concise- 
ness of expression and fulness of thought. ^The rest 
of Bacon's work belongs to the following reign. The 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 67 

splendour of the form, and of the English prose 
of the Advancenwit of Learnings afterwards written 
in the Latin language, and intended to be worked up by 
the addition of the Novum Organum and the Sylva 
Sylvariim into the treatise of the Instaicratio Magna, 
which Bacon intended to be a philosophy of human 
knowledge, raises it into the realm of pure literature. 

6;^. History, except in the publication of the earlier 
Chronicles by Archbishop Parker, does not appear 
again in Elizabeth's reign ; but in the next reign 
Camden, Spelman, and John Speed continued the 
antiquarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon 
pubUshed a history of Henry VII., and Samuel 
Daniel, the poet, in his History of England to the 
Time of Edward III,, 1613 — 1618, was the first to 
throw history into such a literary form as to make it 
popular. Knolles' History of the Turks and Sir 
Walter Raleigh's vast sketch of the History of the 
Woidd show how for the first time history spread 
itself beyond English interests. Raleigh's book, 
written in the peaceful evening of a stormy life, and 
in the quiet of his prison, is not only literary from the 
ease and vigour of its style, but from its still spirit of 
melancholy thought. 

64. The Literature of Travel was carried on 
by the publication in 1589 of Hakluyt's Navigation, 
Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Natio7i, en- 
larged afterwards in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, who 
had himself written a book called Purchas, his Pil- 
grimage ; or, The Relations and Religio7is of the World, 
The influence of a compilation of this kind, contain- 
ing the great deeds of the English on the seas, has 
been felt ever since in the literature of fiction and 
poetry. 

65. Translations. — There are three translators 
that take literary rank among the crowd that carried 
on the work of the earlier time. Two mark the in- 
fluence of Italy, one the more powerful influence of 



6S ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chaf. 

the Greek spirit. Sir John Hartngton in 1591 trans- 
lated Ariosto's Grlajido FiiriosOy Fairfax in 1600 
translated Tdi'^so' s Je?'jcsalej?iy and his book is " one of 
the glories of Elizabeth's reign.*' But the noblest 
translation is that of Homer's whole work by George 
Chapman, the dramatist, the first part of which ap- 
peared in 1598. The vivid life and energ}^ of the time, 
its creative power and its force, are expressed in this 
poem, which is more an Ehzabethan tale written about 
Achilles and Ulysses than a translation. The rushing 
gallop of the long fourteen syllable stanza in which it 
is written has the fire and swiftness of Homer, but it 
has not his directness or dignity. Its ^'inconquerable 
quaintness ^' and diffuseness are as unlike the pure form 
and light and measure of Greek work as possible. 
But it is a distinct poem of such power that it will 
excite and delight all lovers of poetry, as it excited 
and delighted Keats. John Florio's translation of the 
Essays of Mojitaigne^ 1603, is also worth mentioning 
because Shakespeare used the book, and because we 
trace Montaigne's influence on English literature even 
before his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 

(^6. In the Tales, which poured out like a flood 
from the dramatists, from such men as Peele, and 
Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of English 
fiction, and the subjects of many of our plays ; while 
the fantastic attempt to revive the practices of chivalry 
which we have seen in the Arcadia found food in the 
translation of a new school of romances, such as 
Amadis of Gaul, Palmei'in of E?igla7id, and the Sez^en 
Champions of Christendom. We turn now to the 
Poetry. 

67. Edmund Spenser. — The later Elizabethan 
poetry begins with the Shepheai'des Calender of Spenser. 
Spenser was born in London, 1552, and educated 
at Cambridge, which he left at the age of twenty- 
four. Between these dates it is supposed that his 
early boyhood was passed in London, and his youth in 



cv.j FROM 1559 TO 1603. 69 

an English home among the glens of Lancashire. He 
returned thither after he left Cambridge and fell in love 
with a " fair widowe's daughter of the glen " whom he 
called Rosalind, His love was not returned and her 
coldness drove him southward. His college friend, 
Gabriel Harvey, made him known to Leicester, and 
probably, since Harvey was "Leicester's man," to Philip 
Sidney, Leicester's nephew; and it was at Sidney's 
house of Penshurst that the Shepheardes Cale?ider was 
made, and the Faerie Queen begun. The publication 
of the former work in 1579 at once made Spenser the 
first poet of the day, and its literary freshness was 
such that men felt that for the first time since Chaucer, 
England had given birth to a great poet. It was a 
pastoral poem, divided into twelve eclogues, one for 
each month of the year. Shepherds and shepherd 
life were mixed in its verse with complaints for his lost 
love, with a desire for Church reform, with loyalty to 
the Queen, It marks the strong love of old English 
poetry by its reference to Chauce* though it is in 
form imitated from the French pastoral of Clement 
Marot The only tie it really has to Chaucer is in the 
choice of disused English words and spelling, a practice 
of Spenser's which somewhat spoils the Faerie Queen, 
The Puritanism of the poem does not lie in any attack 
on the Episcopal theory, but in an attack on the sloth 
and pomp of the clergy, and in a demand for a nobler 
moral life. It is the same in the Faerie Queen, 

68. The Faerie Queen. — The twelve books 
of this poem were to represent the twelve moral 
virtues, each in the person of a knight who was to 
conquer all the separate sins and errors which were 
at battle with the virtue he personified. In Arthur, 
the king of the company, the Magnificence of the whole 
of virtue was to be represented, and he was at last to 
arrive at union with the Faerie Queen, that divine 
glory of God to which all human thought and act 
aspired. This was Spenser's Puritanism — the desire 



70 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

after a perfectly pure life for State and Church and Man. 
It was opposed in State and Church, he held, by the 
power of Rome which he paints as Duessa, the false- 
hood which wears the garb of truth, and w^ho also 
serves to represent her in whom Catholicism most 
threatened England — Mary, Queen of Scots, Puritan 
in this sense, he is not Puritan in any other. He had 
nothing to do with the attack on Prelacy which was 
then raging, and the last canto of the Faerie Queen 
represents Calidore the knight of courtesy sent forth 
to bridle " the blatant beast,'' the many-tongued and 
noisy Presbyterian body which attacked the Church. 

The poem however soars far above this region of 
debate into the calm and pure air of art. It is the 
poem of the human soul and all its powers struggling 
towards the perfect love, the love w^hich is God. Filled 
full with christianized platonism, the ideas of truth, 
justice, temperance, courtesy do not remain ideas in 
Spenser's mind, as in Plato's, but become real personages 
whose lives and battles he honours and tells in verse 
so delicate, so gliding, and so steeped in the finer life 
of poetry, that he has been called the poet's poet. 
As the nobler Puritanism of the time is found in it, so 
also are the other influences of the time. It goes 
back, as men were doing then, to the old times for 
its framework, to the Celtic story of Arthur and his 
knights that Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Chaucer, and 
Thomas Malory had loved. It represents the new 
love of chivalry, the new love of classical learning, 
the new delight in mystic theories of love and reli- 
gion. It is full of those allegorical schemes in which 
doctrines and heresies, virtues and vices were con- 
trasted and personified. It takes up and uses the 
popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, and 
mingles them with the savages and the wonders of 
the New World of which the voyagers told in every 
company. Nearly the whole spirit of the English 
Renaissance under Elizabeth, except its coarser and 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 71 

baser elements, is in its pages. Of anything im- 
pure or ugly, or violent, there is not a trace. Spenser 
walks through the whole of this woven world of faerie 

**With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." 

The first three books were finished in Ireland, whither 
he had gone as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 
1580. Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman 
Castle, among the alder shades of the river Mulla 
that fed the lake below the castle. Delighted with the 
poem, he brought Spenser to England. The books 
were pubHshed in 1590, and the Queen, the Court, and 
the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's de- 
light It was the first great ideal poem that Eng- 
land had produced, and it is the source of all our 
modern poetry. It has never ceased to make poets, 
and it will not lose its power while our language lasts. 
69. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year,, 
1 59 1, Spenser being still in England, collected his> 
smaller poems and published them. Among XkvtvdMother 
Hubbard's Tale is a bright imitation of Chaucer, and 
the Teai's of the Muses supports my statement that litera- 
ture was looked on coldly previous to 1580 by the 
complaint the Muses make in it of their subjects being 
despised in England. Sidney had died in 1586, and 
three of these poems bemoan his death. The others 
are of slight importance, and the whole collection 
was entitled Complaints. Returning to Ireland he 
gave an account of his visit in Colin Cloufs come 
Home again, 1591, and at last after more than a year's, 
pursuit won his second love for his wife, and found' 
with her perfect happiness. A long series of Soimets 
records the progress of his wooing, and the Epitha- 
lamiicm, his marriage hymn, is the most glorious 
love-song in the English tongue. At the close of 1595 
he brought to England in a second visit the last 
three books of the Faerie Queen. The next year he 
spent in London and published these books with 
7 



72 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [cha p. 

his other poems, the Prothalafnioii on the marriage of 
Lord Worcester's daughters, and his Hymnes to Love 
and Beauty^ and to Heavenly Love and Beauty, in 
which the love philosophy of Petrarca is enshrined. 
The end of his life was sorrowful. In 1598 the Irish 
rising took place, his castle was burnt, and he and his 
family fled for their lives to England. Broken-hearted, 
poor, but not forgotten, the poet died in a London 
tavern. All his fellows went with his body to the 
grave where, close by Chaucer, he lies in Westminster 
Abbey. London, " his most kindly nurse," takes care 
also of his dust, and England keeps him in her love. 

70. Later Elizabethan Pdetry, its Three 
Phases. — Spenser reflected in his poems the spirit 
of the English Renaissance. The other poetry of 
Elizabeth's reign reflected the whole of English Life. 
The best way to arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama 
— is in an order parallel to the growth of the national 
life, and the proof that it is the best way is that on 
the whole such an order is a true chronological order. 
First then, if we compare England after 1580, as 
writers have often done, to an ardent youth, we shall 
find in the poetry of the first years that followed that 
date all the elements of youth. It is a poetry of love, 
and romance, and fancy. Secondly, and later on, when 
Englishmen grew older in feeling, their unsettled 
enthusiasm, which had flitted here and there in action 
and literature over all kinds of subjects, settled down 
into a steady enthusiasm for England itself. The 
country entered on its early manhood, and parallel 
with this there is the great outburst of historical 
plays, and a set of poets whom I will call the patriotic 
poets. Thirdly, and later still, all enthusiasm died 
down into a graver and more thoughtful national life, 
and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare 
and the poets whom I will call philosophical. These 
three classes of Poets overlapped one another, and 
grew up gradually, but on the whole their succession 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 73 

represents a real succession of national thought and 
emotion. 

K fourth and separate phase does not represent, as 
these do, a new national hfe, a new rehgion, and new 
politics, but the despairing struggle of the old faith 
against the new. There were numbers of men such 
as Wordsworth has finely sketched in old Norton 
in the Doe of Rylstone^ who vainly strove in sorrow 
against all the new national elements. Robert South- 
well, of Norfolk, a Jesuit priest, was the poet of 
Roman Catholic England. Imprisoned for three years, 
racked ten times, and finally executed, he wrote during 
his prison time his two longest poems, St. Peter's Com- 
plaint^ and Mary Magdalene's Fimeral Tears^ and it 
marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in 
the country but also the strange contrasts of the 
time that~ eleven editions of poems with these titles 
were published between 1593 and 1600, at a time 
when the Ve?ms and Adonis of Shakespeare led the 
way for a multitude of poems that sung of love and 
delight and England's glory. To these we now turn. 

71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this 
name because in all its best work (to be found in the 
first book of Mr. Palgrave's " Golden Treasury '') it is 
almost limited to that subject — the subject of youth. 
It is chiefly composed in the form of songs and sonnets 
and was published in miscellanies in and after 1600. 
The most famous of these, in which men like Nicholas 
Breton, Henry Constable, W. Barnfield and others 
wrote, are England's Helicon, and Davison's Rhapsody 
and the Passiojiate Pilgrim. The latter contained 
some poems of Shakespeare, and he is by virtue of 
these, and the songs in his Dramas, the best of these 
lyric writers. The songs themselves are '^old and 
plain, and dallying with the innocence of love.'' They 
have natural sweetness, great simplicity of speech, 
and directness of statement. Some, as Shakespeare's, 
possess a '' passionate reahty ; " others a quaint pastor- 



74 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [cHAr. 

alism like shepherd life in porcelain, such as Marlowe's 
well known song, " Come live with me, and be my love;" 
others a splendour of love and beauty as in Lodge's 
Song of Rosaline and Spensers on his marriage. 
The sonnets were written chiefly in series, and I have 
already said that such writers are called amourists. 
Such were Shakespeare's and the Aitioretti of Spenser, 
and those to Diana by Constable. They were often 
mixed with Canzones and Ballatas after the Italian 
manner, and the best of these were a series by 
Sir Philip Sidney. A number of other sonnets and of 
longer love poems were written by the dramatists 
before Shakespeare, by Peele and Greene and Mar- 
lowe and Lodge, far the finest being the Hero and 
Leander^ which Marlowe left as a fragment to be 
completed by Chapman. Mingled up with these were 
small religious poems, the reflection of the Puritan and 
the more religious Church element in English society. 
They were collected under such titles as the Handful 
of Honeysuckles, the Poor Widow's Mite, Psabns and 
Sonnets, and there are some good things among 
them written by William Hunnis. 

In one Scotch poet, William Drummond of Haw- 
thornden, the friend of Ben Jonson, the love poet 
and the religious poet were united. I mention him 
here, though his work properly belongs to the reign 
of James L, because his poetry really goes back in 
spirit and feeling to this time. He cannot be counted 
among the true Scottish poets. Drummond is entirely 
Elizabethan and English, and he is worthy to be 
named among the lyrical poets below Spenser and 
Shakespeare. His love sonnets have as much grace as 
Sidney's and less quaintness, his songs have often 
the grave simplicity of Wyat, and his religious poems, 
especially one solemn sonnet on John the Baptist, 
have a distant resemblance to the grandeur of IVIilton. 

72. The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry 
of Romance, Chivalr^^ Religion, and Love, rose a 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 75 

poetry which devoted itself to the glory of England. 
It was chiefly historical, and as it may be said to have 
had its germ in the Mirror of Magistrates^ so it had 
its perfect flower ia the historical drama of Shake- 
speare. Men had now begun to have a great pride 
in England. She had stepped into the foremost rank, 
had outwitted France, subdued internal foes, beaten 
and humbled Spain on every sea. Hence the history 
of the land became precious, and the very rivers 
and hills and plains honourable, and to be sung and 
praised in verse. This poetic impulse is best repre- 
sented in the works of three men — William Warner, 
Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton. Born within 
a few years of each other, about 1560, they all lived 
beyond the century, and the national poetry they set 
on foot lasted when the romantic poetry died. 

William Warner's great book was Albion's Engla7id^ 
1586, a history of England in verse from the Deluge 
to Queen Ehzabeth. It is clever, humorous, crowded 
wdth stories, and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity 
was great, and the English in which it was written 
deserved it. Such stories as A r gentile and Curan^ 
and the Patient Countess^ prove him to have had a 
true and pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not 
however better than that of '' well-languaged Daniel," 
who among tragedies and pastoral comedies and 
poems of pure fancy wrote in verse a prosaic History 
of the Civil Wars, T595, as we have already found 
him writing history in prose. Spenser saw in him a 
new "shepherd'' of poetry who did far surpass the 
others, and Coleridge says that the style of his 
Hymen's Triimiph may be declared "imperishable 
English.'' Of the three the greatest poet w^as Drayton. 
Two historical poems are his work — the Civil Wars 
of Edward II, a7td the JBajvns, and England s Ileroical 
Epistles, 1598. Not content with these, he set him- 
self to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyolbion, 
thirty books, and more than 30,000 lines. It is a 



76 ENGLISH LITER A 7 URE. [chap. 

description in Alexandrines of the *• tracts, mountains, 
forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of 
Britain, with intermixture of the most remarkable 
stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and commo- 
ditieLS of the same, digested into a poem.'' It was 
not a success, though it deserved success. Its 
great length was against it, but the real reason was 
that this kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared 
in 1 613, in James I.'s reign. 

73. Philosophical Poets. — Before that time a 
change had come. As the patriotic poets came 
after the romantic, so the romantic were followed 
by the philosophical poets. The youth and early 
manhood of the Elizabethan poetry passed, about 
1600, into its thoughtful manhood. The land was 
settled ; enterprise ceased to be the first thing ; men 
sat down to think, and in poetry questions of religious 
and political philosophy were treated with '^senten- 
tious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." Shake- 
speare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 
1602, represents this change. The two poets who re- 
present it are Sir J no. Davies and Fulke Greville, 
Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance 
of it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra^ 1596, in 
which the whole world is explained as a dance, is as 
gay and bright as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is 
compact and vigorous reasoning, for the most part 
without fancy. Its very title, Nosce te ipstt7n — Know 
Thyself — and its divisions, i. " On humane learning," 
2. *'The immortality of the soul" — mark the altera- 
tion. Two little poems, one of Bacon's, on the 
Life of A fan, as a bubble, and one of Sir Henry 
Wotton's, on the Character of a Happy Life, are in- 
stances of the same change. It is still more marked 
in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On LTuman 
Learning, on Wars, 07t Afonarchy, and on Religio7t. 
They are political and historical treatises, not poems, 
and all in them, says Lamb, '' is made frozen and 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 77 

rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, " they are 
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit 
on political science which was to produce the riper 
speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." We 
turn now to the Drama, which includes all these 
different forms of poetry. 

THE DRAMA. 

74. Early Dramatic Representation in Eng- 
land. — The drama, as in Greece, so in England, began 
in religion. In early times none but the clergy could 
read the stories of their religion, and it was not the 
custom to deliver sermons to the people. It was neces- 
sary to instruct uneducated men in tlie history of 
the Bible, the Christian faith, the lives of the Saints 
and Martyrs. Hence the Church set on foot 
miiracle plays and mysteries. We find the first of 
these about mo, when Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of 
St. Albans-, prepared his miracle play of St. Catherine 
for acting. Such plays became more frequent from 
the time of Henry II., and they were so common 
in Chaucer's time that they were the resort of idle 
gossips in Lent. The wife of Bath went to " plays of 
miracles and marriages.'' They were acted not only 
by the clergy, but by the laity. About the year 
1268 the town guilds began to take them into their 
own hands, and acted complete sets of plays, setting 
forth the whole of Scripture history from the Creation 
to the Day of Judgment. Each guild took one play 
in the set. They lasted sometimes three days, some- 
times eight, and were represented on a great movable 
stage on wheels in the open spaces of the towns. Of 
these sets we have three remaining, the Towneley, 
Coventry and Chester plays : 1300 — 1600. The first 
set has 32, the second 42, and the third 25 plays. 

75. The Miracle Play was a representation of 
some portion of Scripture history, or of the life of some 



78 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

Saint of the Church. The Mystery was a represen- 
tation of any portion of the New Testament history 
concerned with a mysterious subject, such as the 
Incarnation, the Atonement or the Resurrection. It 
has been attempted to distinguish these more particu- 
larly, but they are mingled together in England 
into one. From the towns they went to the Court 
and the houses of nobles. The Kings kept players 
of them, and we know that exhibiting Scripture plays 
at great festivals was part of the domestic regulations 
of the great houses, and that it was the Chaplain's 
business to write them. Their '^ Dumb Show " and 
their ^' Chorus" leave their trace in the regular drama. 
We cannot say that the modern drama arose after 
them, for it came in before they died out in England. 
They were still acted in Chester in 1577, and in 
Coventry in 1580. 

76. The Morality was the next step to these, and 
in it we come to a representation which is closely con- 
nected with the drama. It was a play in which the 
characters were the Vices and Virtues, with the 
addition afterwards of allegorical personages, such as 
Riches, Good Deeds, Confession, Death, and any 
human condition or quality needed for the play. 
These characters were brought together in a rough 
story, at the end of which Virtue triumphed, or some 
moral principle was established. The dramatic fool 
grew up in the Moralities out of a personage called 
" The Vice," and the humorous element was intro- 
duced by the retaining of "The Devir' from the 
Miracle play and by making the Vice torment him. 
They were continually represented, but becoming 
coarser were finally supplanted by the regular drama 
about the end of Elizabeth's reign. 

77. The Transition between these and the 
regular Drama is not hard to trace. The Virtues 
and Vices were dull because they stirred no human 
sympathy. Historical characters were therefore then 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 79 

introduced, Avho were celebrated for a virtue or a vice ; 
Brutus represented patriotism, Aristides represented 
justice ; or, as in Bale's Kynge Johan^ historical and 
allegorical personages were mixed together. The 
transition was hastened by the impulse of the Re- 
formation. The religious struggle came so home to 
men's hearts that they were not satisfied with subjects 
drawn from the past, and the Morality was used to 
support the Catholic or the Protestant side. Real men 
and women were shown under the thin cloaks of its 
allegorical characters ; the vices and the follies of the 
time were displayed. It was the origin of satiric 
comedy. The stage was becoming a living power 
when this began.. The excitement of the audience 
w^as now very different from that felt in listening to 
Virtues and Vices, and a demand arose for a comedy 
and tragedy which should picture human life in all 
its forms. The Interludes of John Heywood, most 
of Avhich were written for Court representation in 
Henry VIII.'s time 1530, 1540, represent this further 
transition. They differed from the Morality in 
that most of the characters were drawn from real 
life, but they retained "the Vice" as a personage. 
The Interlude — a short, humorous piece, to be acted 
in the midst of the Morality for the amusement of 
the people — had been frequently used, but Heywood 
isolated it from the Morality and made of it a kind 
of farce. Out of it we may say grew English comedy. 
78. The First Stage of the regular Drama 
begins with the first English comedy, Ralph Roister 
Doister, written by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton, 
known to have been acted before 1551, but not 
published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of 
London manners ; the characters are well drawn ; it 
is divided into regular acts and scenes and is made 
in rime. The first English tragedy is Gorbodtic, 
written by Sackville and Norton and represented in 
1562. The story was taken from British legend, and 



So ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

the characters are gravely sustained. But the piece 
was heavy and too solemn for the audience, and 
Richard Edwards by mixing tragic and comic ele- 
ments together in his play, Damon and Pythias., 
acted about 1564, succeeded better. These two gave 
the impulse to a number of dramas from classical 
and modern story, which were acted at the Universi- 
ties, Inns of Court, and the Court up to 1580, when 
the drama, having gone through its boyhood, entered 
on a vigorous manhood. More than fifty-two dramas, 
so quick was their production, are known to have 
been acted up to this time. Some were translated 
from the Greek, as the Jocasta from Euripides, and 
others from the Italian, as the Supposes from Ariosto, 
both by the same author, George Gascoigne, already 
mentioned as a satirist. These were acted in 1566. 

79. The Theatre. — There was as yet no theatre. 
A patent was given in 1574 to the Earl of Leicester's 
servants to act plays in any town in England, and 
they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Theatre. In the 
same year two others were set up in the fields about 
Shoreditch—^' The Theatre" and "The Curtain." The 
Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare and his fellows 
in 1594, may stand as a type of the rest. In the form 
of a hexagon outside, it was circular within and open 
to the weather, except above the stage. The play began 
at three o'clock ; the nobles and ladies sat in boxes or 
in stools on the stage, the people stood in the pit or 
yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, was a naked 
room with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden imitations 
of animals, towers, woods, etc., were all the scenery 
used, and a board, stating the place of action, was 
hung out from the top when the scene changed. Boys 
acted the female parts. It was only after the restora- 
tion that movable scenery and actresses were intro- 
duced. No "pencil's aid" supphed the landscape of 
Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle 
of Duncan, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 



IV.] FROM 1559 ro 1603. 81 

80. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges 
from 1580 to 1596. It includes the work of Lyly 
(author of the Jbicphties)^ the plays of Peele, Greene, 
Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, Munday, Chettle, Nash, and 
the earUest works of Shakespeare. During this time 
we know that more than 100 different plays were per- 
formed by four out of the eleven companies ; so swift 
and plentiful was their production. They were written 
in prose, and in rime, and in blank verse mixed 
with prose and rime. Prose and rime, prevailed 
before 1587, when Marlowe in his play of Tambu7iaine 
made blank verse the fashion. John Lyly illustrates 
the three methods, for he wrote seven plays in prose, 
one in rime, and one (after Tambiirlaine) in blank 
verse. Some beautiful little songs scattered through 
them are the forerunners of the songs with which 
Shakespeare made his dramas bright, and the witty 
'' quips and cranks," repartees, and similes of their fan- 
tastic prose dialogue were the school of Shakespeare's 
prose dialogue. Peele, Greene, and Marlowe 
are the three important names of the period. They 
are the first in whose hands the play of human 
passion and action is expressed with any true dramatic 
effect. Peele and Greene make their characters act 
on, and draw out, one another in the several scenes, 
but they have no power of making a plot, or of work- 
ing out their plays, scene by scene, to a natural 
conclusion. They are, in one word, without art, and 
their characters, even when they talk in good poetry, 
are neither natural nor simple. 

Christopher Marlowe, on the other hand, rose 
by degrees and easily into mastery of his art. The 
difference between the unequal and violent action 
and thought of his Doctor Faicstiis^ and the quiet 
and orderly progression to its end of the play of 
Edward Jf., is all the more remarkable when we 
know that he died at thirty. Though less than 
Shakespeare, he was worthy to precede him. As he 



82 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [ch a p. 

may be said to have invented and made the verse of 
the drama, so he created the Enghsh tragic drama. 
His plays are wrought with art to their end, his 
characters are sharply and strongly outlined. Each 
play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, its 
power, and its extremes. Tamburlaiiie paints the 
desire of universal empire; \h.t Jew of Malt a ^ the pas- 
sions of greed and hatred; Docto?' Faiistus, the struggle 
and failure of man to possess all knowledge and all 
pleasure without toil and without law; Edward IL, 
the misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. 
Marlowe's verse is "mighty,'' his poetry strong and weak 
alike with passionate feeling, and expressed with a tur- 
bulent magnificence of words and images, the fault of 
which is a very great want of temperance. It reflects 
his life and the lives of those with whom he lived. Mar- 
lowe lived and died an irreligious, imaginative, tender- 
hearted, licentious poet. Peele and Greene lived an 
even more riotous life and died as miserably, and they 
are examples of a crowd of other dramatists who passed 
their lives between the theatre, the wine-shop, and 
the prison. Their drama, in which we see the better 
side of the men, had all the marks of a wild youth. 
It was daring, full of strong but unequal life, romantic, 
sometimes savage, often tender, always exaggerated in 
its treatment and expression of the human passions. 
If it had no moderation, it had no tame dulness. Jf 
it was coarse, it was powerful, and it was above all 
national. It was a time full of strange contrasts, a 
time of fiery action and of sentimental contempla- 
tion ; a time of fancy and chivalry, indelicacy and 
buffoonery ; of great national adventure and private 
brawls, of literary quiet and polemic thought ; of faith 
and infidelity — and the whole of it is painted with 
truth, but with too glaring colours, in the drama of 
these men. 

8i. William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist 
of the w^orld, now took up the work of Marlowe, and in 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 83 

twenty-eight years made the drama represent the whole 
of human life. He was born April 26, 1564, the son 
of a comfortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While 
he was still young his father fell into poverty, and an 
interrupted education left him an inferior scholar. 
'' He had small Latin and less Greek." But by dint of 
genius and by living in a society in which all sorts of in- 
formation were attainable, he became an accomplished 
man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote 
Park is without proof, but it is probable that his youth 
w^as wild and passionate. At nineteen, he married 
Ann Hathaway, seven years older than himself, and 
was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or 
from poverty, or from the driving of the genius that 
led him to the stage, he left Stratford about 1586-7, and 
came to London at the age of twenty-two years, and 
falling in with Marlowe, Greene and the rest, became 
an actor and play-wright, and may have lived their 
unrestrained and riotous life for some years. 

82. His First Period. — It is probable that before 
leaving Stratford he had composed a part at least 
of his Vemcs and Adonis. It is full of the country 
sights and sounds, of the w^ays of birds and animals, 
such as he saw when wandering in Charlecote Park. 
Its rich and overladen poetry and its warm colouring 
made him, when it was published in 1593, at once the 
favourite of men like Lord Southampton and lifted him 
into fame. But before that date he had done work for 
the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new 
ones. We seem to trace his "prentice hand" in many 
dramas of the time, but the first he is usually thought to 
have retouched is Titus Androniciis^ and some time 
after the First Part of FFenry VF. Lovers Labour's 
Lost the first of his original plays, in which he 
quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was fol- 
lowed by the rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors. 
Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed 
into pure poetry in the Mid summer- Nigh f s Dream^ 



84 ENGL ISH LITER A TURE, [c h ap. 

and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, 
the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the 
English mechanic. Italian story then laid its charm 
upon him, and the Two Gejitlemen of Verona preceded 
the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet^ in 
which he first reached tragic power. They complete, 
with Loves Labour's Won, afterwards recast as All's 
Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early 
period. We may perhaps add to them the second 
act of an older play, Edward LIL We should cer- 
tainly read along with them, as belonging to the same 
passionate time, his Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally 
printed in 1594, one year later than the Vemcs and 
Adonis, 

The same poetic succession we have traced in the 
poets is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic 
feeling of England, also represented in Marlowe and 
Peele, now seized on him, and he turned from love to 
begin his great series of historical plays with Richard 
LL., 1593 — 4. Richard ILL. followed quickly. To 
introduce it and to complete the subject, he recast the 
Second and Third Parts of Hejuy VL. (written by 
some unknown authors) and ended his first period by 
Ring John ; five plays in a little more than two years. 

83. His Second Period, 1596 — 1602. — In the 
Merchant of F^/z/^r^ Shakespeare reached entire mastery 
over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic 
threads is brought to its highest point of colour when 
Portia and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy fol- 
lowed in his retouch of the old Tamijig of the Shreuf, 
and all the wit of the world mixed with noble history 
met next in the three comedies of Falstaff, the first 
and second Llejiry LV, and the Merry Wives of Wind- 
sor. The historical plays were then closed with 
Henry F, ; a, splendid dramatic song to the glory of 
England. The Globe theatre, in which he was one of 
the proprietors, was now started, and in the comedies 
he wTotQ for it Shakespeare turned to write of love 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 85 

again, not to touch its deeper passion as before but to 
play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing 
dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was followed by 
the far-off forest world of As You Like It, where 
" the time fleets carelessly," and Rosahnd's character 
is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in 
a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the 
first touch we have of the older Shakspere who 
had " gained his experience, and whose experience 
had made him sad." As yet it was but a touch ; 
Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play 
that followed, All's Well TJiat Ends Well, again 
strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully 
grown in the later sonnets, which are said to have been 
finished about 1602. They were published in 1609. 

Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind 
changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this 
period, famous, and loved by society. He was the friend 
of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and William 
Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The Queen patronized 
him ; all the best literary society was his own. He 
had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best 
house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of 
wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his hfe seems to 
have grown dark. His best friends fell into ruin, 
Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton went to 
the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the Court ; 
he may himself, as some have thought, have been con- 
cerned in the rising of Essex. Added to this, we may 
conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry of the 
sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed 
in his love by a dear friend. Disgust of his profes- 
sion as an actor and public and private ill weighed 
heavily on him, and in darkness of spirit, he retired 
from the business of the theatre, and passed from 
comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to 
tell the tragedy of mankind. 

84. His Third Period, 1602 — 1608, begins with 



86 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It contains all the 
great tragedies, and opens with the fate of Hamlet, 
who felt, like the poet himself, that *^the time was 
out of joint.'' Hamlet, the dreamer, may well repre- 
sent Shakespeare as he stood aside from the crash that 
overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the changing 
world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure 
was next written and is tragic in thought throughout. 
Julius Ccesar, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Ti'oilus and 
Cresstda (finished from an incomplete work of his 
youth), Antony and Cleopatra, Corlolanus, Timon, 
(only in part his own), were all written in these five 
years. The darker sins of men, the unpitying fate 
which slowly gathers round and falls on men, the 
avenging wrath of conscience, the cruelty and punish- 
ment of weakness, the treachery, lust, jealousy, 
ingratitude, madness of men, the follies of the great 
and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand 
other varying moods and passions, painted, and felt as 
his own while he painted them, during this stern time. 
85. His Fourth Period, 1608— 1613. — As Shake- 
speare wrote of these things he passed out of them, 
and his last days are full of the gentle and loving calm 
of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate but 
has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his 
great contemporary Bacon, he left the Avorld and his 
own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet 
dignity sought the innocence and stillness of country 
life. The country breathes through all the dramas of 
this time. The flowers Perdita gathers in Winter's 
Tale, the frolic of the sheep-shearing, he may have 
seen in the Stratford meadows; the song of Fidele in 
Cy?nbeline is written by one who already feared no 
more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor censure 
rash, and was looking forward to the time when men 
should say of him — 

" Quiet consummation have ; 
And renowned be thy grave ! " 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. ^-J 

Shakespeare left London in 1609, and from that time 
lived in the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. 
He was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays 
he writes speak of domestic peace and forgiveness. 
The story of Marina^ which he left unfinished, and 
which two later writers expanded into the play of 
Pericles^ is the first of his closing series of dramas. 
The Tiiw Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, a great part of 
which is now, on doubtful grounds I think, attributed to 
Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspira- 
tion of Chaucer, would belong to this period. Cymbe- 
iine, Wi7itei''s Tale, and the Tempest, bring his history 
up to 1612, and in the next year he closed his poetic 
life by writing, with Fletcher, Hem-y VIII. All these 
belong to and praise forgiveness, and it seems, if we 
may conjecture, that looking back on all the wrong 
he had suffered and on all that he had done, Shake- 
speare could say in the forgiveness he gave to men, and 
in the forgiveness he sought from God, the words he 
had written in earlier days: ''The quality of mercy is 
not strained.'' For three years he kept silence, and 
then, on the 23rd of April, 1616, on his fifty-second 
birthday, he died 

^6. His work. — We can only guess with regard to 
Shakespeare's life ; we can only guess with regard to his 
character. It has been tried to find out what he was 
from his sonnets, and from his plays, but every attempt 
seems to be a failure. We cannot lay our hand on 
anything and say for certain that it was spoken by 
Shakespeare out of his own character. The most 
personal thing in all his writings is one that has 
been scarcely noticed/ It is the Epilogue to the Tem- 
pest, and if it be, as is most probable, the last thing 
he ever wrote, then its cry for forgiveness, its tale 
of inward sorrow only to be relieved by prayer, give 
us some dim insight into how the silence of those 
three years was passed ; while its declaration of his 
aim in v/riting 'Svhich was to please" — the true defini- 



88 ENGLISH LITERATURE. , [chap. 

tion of an artist's aim — should make us very cautious in 
our efforts to define his character from his works. 
Shakespeare made men and women whose dramatic 
action on each other, and towards a catastrophe, was 
intended to please the public, not to reveal himself. 
He was altogether, from end to end, an artist, and 
the greatest artist the modern world has known. No 
commentary on his writings, no guesses about his life 
or character, are worth much which do not rest on 
this canon as their foundation — What he did, thought, 
learned, and felt, he did, thought, learned, and felt as 
an artist. And he was never less the artist, through 
all the changes of the time. Fully influenced, as we 
see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philo- 
sophic cast of thought of the later time of EUzabeth ; 
passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry 
took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place of 
imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the 
place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves 
to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, 
the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Eliza- 
bethan poetry. The Winter's Tale is as lovely a love 
story as Romeo ajidj^uliet^ the Tempest \% more instinct 
with imagination and as great in fancy as the Mid- 
summer- Nighfs JDrea^n, and yet there are fully twenty 
years between them. The only change is in the increase 
of power and in a closer and graver grasp of human 
nature. In this unchangeableness of pure art-power 
Shakespeare stands entirely alone. Around him the 
whole tone and manner of the drama altered for the 
worse as his life went on, but his work grew to the close 
in strength and beauty. 

87. The Decay of the Drama begins while 
Shakespeare is alive. At first one can scarcely call it 
decay, it was so magnificent. For it began with " rare 
Ben Jonson."' His first play, in its very title, Evejy 
Alan in his Hiunour^ 1596-98, enables us to say in 
what the first step of this decay consisted. The drama 



IV.] FBOM 1559 TO 1603. 89 

in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the 
whole of human nature, the painting of characters as 
they were built up by their natural bent, and by the 
play of circumstance upon them. The drama, in Ben 
Jonson's hands, was the painting of that particular 
human nature which he saw in his own age ; and his 
characters are not men and women as they are, but as 
they may become when they are mastered by a special 
bias of the mind or humour. '' The Manners, now- 
called Humours, feed the Stage,'' says Jonson himself. 
Every Man in his Htcmour w^as followed by Every 
Man out of his Hinnour^ and by Cynthia's Revels^ 
written to satirize the courtiers. The fierce satire of 
these plays brought the town down upon him, and 
he replied to their " noise " in the Poetaster^ in which 
Dekker and Marston were satirized. Dekker answered 
with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on the Poet- 
aster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects. 
The staring Leviathan, as he calls Jonson, is not a 
very untrue description. Silent then for two years, he 
reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and shortly 
after produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s 
reign, Volpone the Eox, The Silent Woman, and The 
Alchemist, 1 605-9-10. The first is the finest thing 
he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest 
and skill of its plot ; the second is chiefly valuable as 
a picture of English life in high society ; the third is 
full to weariness of Jonson's obscure learning, but its 
character of Sir Epicure Mammon redeems it. In 
161 1 his Catiline appeared, and eight years after 
he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became poor 
and palsy stricken, but his genius did not decay. The 
most graceful and tender thing he ever wrote was 
written in his old age. His pastoral drama The Sad 
Shepherd proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew 
kinder and gentler as he grew near to death, and 
death took him in 1637. He was a great man. The 
power of the young Ehzabethan age belonged to him; 



90 EXGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

and he stands far below, but still worthily by, Shake- 
speare, " a robust, surly, and observing dramatist." 

'^'^, Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could 
turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name 
that we connect the Masques, Masques were dramatic 
representations made for a festive occasion, with a re- 
ference to the persons present and the occasion. Their 
personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue, 
music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of 
some ingenious f^.ble into a whole. They were made 
and performed for the court and the houses of the 
nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied 
as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and 
unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute 
in Henry VIII. 's time, they reached splendour under 
James and Charles I. Great men took part in them. 
When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the 
scenery, and Lawes the music, and Lord Bacon, White- 
lock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great 
masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made 
them worthier by writing Co7nus, and their scenic deco- 
ration was soon introduced into the regular theatres. 

89. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, 
but out of more than fifty plays, all written in James 
I/s reign, not more than fourteen were shared in by 
Beaumont, who died at the age of thirty in 16 16. 
Fletcher survived him, and died in 1625. Both were 
of gentle birth. Beaumont, where we can trace his 
work, is weightier and more dignified than his comrade, 
but Fletcher was the better poet. Fletcher wrote 
rapidly, but his imagination worked slowly. Their 
Philaster and Thierry and Theodoret are fine examples 
of their tragic power. Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess 
is full of lovely poetry, and both are masters of 
grace, and pathos and style. They enfeebled the 
blank verse of the drama, while they rendered it sweeter 
by using feminine endings and adding an eleventh 
syllable with great frequency. This gave freedom and 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 91 

elasticity to their verse and was suited to the dialogue 
of comedy, but it lowered the dignity of their tragedy. 
The two men mark a change in politics and society 
from Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare's loyalty is con- 
stitutional ; Beaumont and Fletcher are bhnd supporters 
of James I.'s invention of the divine right of kings. 
Shakespeare's society was on the \yhole decent, and it 
is so in his plays. Beaumont and Fletcher are 
" studiously indecent. '^ In contrast to them Shakespeare 
is as white as snow. Shakespeare's men are of the type 
of Sidney and Raleigh, Burleigh and Drake. The men 
of these two writers represent the " young bloods ; '^ 
of the Stuart Court; and even the best of their older 
and graver men are base and foul in thought. Their 
women are either monsters of badness or of goodness. 
When they paint a good woman (two or three at most 
being excepted), she is beyond nature. The fact is 
that the high art which in Shakespeare sought to give a 
noble pleasure by being true to human nature in its 
natural aspects, sank now into the baser art which 
v/ished to excite, at any cost, the passions of the 
audience by representing human nature in unnatural 
aspects. 

90. In Massinger and Ford this evil is just as 
plainly marked. Massinger s first dated play was the 
Virgin Marty 7% 1620. He lived poor, and died ^' a 
stranger," in 1639. I^ these twenty years he wrote 
thirty-seven plays, of which the Ne7u Way to Pay 
Old Debts is the best known by its character of 
Sir Giles Overreach. No Avriter is fouler in language, 
and there is a want of unity of impression both in his 
plots and in his characters. He often sacrifices art to 
effect, and " unlike Shakespeare, seems often to de- 
spise his own characters." On the other hand, his 
versification and language are flexible and strong. 
" and seem to rise out of the passions he describes." 
He speaks the tongue of real life. His men and 
women are far more natural than those of Beaumont 



92 ENGLISH LITER A 1 UKE. [chap. 

and Fletcher, and with all his coarseness, he is the 
most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere is 
his work so great as when he represents the brave man 
struggling through trial to victory, the pure woman 
suffering for the sake of truth and love ; or when he 
describes the terrors that conscience brings on in- 
justice and cruelty. John Ford, his contemporary, 
published his first play, the Love?''s Melancholy, in 
1629, and five years after, Ferkin IVarbeck, the best 
historical drama after Shakespeare. Between these 
dates appeared others, of which the best is the Broken 
Heart. He carried to an extreme the tendency of 
the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he 
did so with very great power. He has no comic 
humour, but no man has described better the worn 
and tortured human heart. 

91. Webster and other Dramatists. — Higher 
as a poet, and possessing the same power as Ford, 
though not the same exquisite tenderness, was John 
Webster, whose best drama, The Duchess of Malfi^ 
was acted in 16 16. Vittoria Coromhofia was printed 
in 161 2, and was followed by the Devils Lata 
Case, Applies and Vu'gmia, and others. Webster's 
peculiar power of creating ghastly horror is re- 
deemed from sensationaUsm by his poetic insight. 
His imagination easily saw, and expressed in short and 
intense lines, the inmost thoughts and feelings of 
characters whom he represents as wrought on by 
misery, or crime, or remorse, at their very highest 
point of passion. In his worst characters there is some 
redeeming touch, and this poetic pity brings him nearer 
to Shakespeare than the rest. He is also neither so 
coarse, nor so great a king worshipper, nor so irreligious 
as the others. We seem to taste the Puritan in his 
work. Two comedies Westward Ho I and Noj^th- 
7ifard Ho I remarkable for the light they throw on the 
manners of the time, were written by him along with 
Thomas Dekker. John Chapman is the only one of 



IV.] FROM 1559 TO 1603. 93 

the later Elizabethan dramatists who kept the old fire 
of Marlowe, though he never had the naturalness or 
temperance which lifted Shakespeare far beyond Mar- 
lowe. The same power which we have seen in his 
translation of Homer is to be found in his plays. 
The mingling of intellectual power with imagination, 
swollen violence of words and images with tender and 
natural and often splendid passages, is entirely in the 
earlier Elizabethan manner. He too, like Marlowe, to 
quote his own line, " hurled instinctive fire about the 
world." These were the greatest names among a 
crowd of dramatists. We can only mention John 
Marston, Henry Glapthorne, Richard Browne, William 
Rowley, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and 
Thomas Hey wood. Of these, '' all of whom," says 
Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, and had a 
set of moral feelings and notions in common," James 
Shirley is the last. He lived till 1666. In him the 
fire and passion of the old time passes away, but some 
of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Eliza- 
bethan drama dies. In 1642, the theatres were closed 
during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling 
players managed to exist with difficulty, and against 
the law, till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had 
his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. 
It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point 
but impurity different from the old, and four years 
after at the Restoration it broke loose from the prison 
of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless licence. 

In this rapid sketch of the Drama in England we 
have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth 
to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- 
cause it keeps the whole story together. We now return 
to the time that followed the accession of James I. 

Note. — The dates and arrangement of Shakespeare's plays 
given above are only tentative. They are so placed by the con- 
jectures of the latest criticism, and the conjectures wait for 
proof. 



94 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [chap. 



CHAPTER V. 

FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION. 

1603-1660. 

Lord Bacon, Advancement of Learning (two books), 1605 ; 
expanded into nine Latin books, 1623 ; Novum Oi'ganon 
(first sketch), 1607 ; finished, 1620 ; Hisioi^ia naturalis et 
expenmentaliSj 1622. These three form the Instauratio 
Magna ; last edition of Essays, 1625 ; dies 1626- — Giles 
Fletcher's Temptation of Christ, 1610- — W. Browne's 
Britannia^ s Pastorals, 1613, 16. — ^J- Donne's Pjejus and 
Satires, 1613-1635.— G. Wither, Poems, 1H13-1622-1641. 
—George Herbert, Temple, 1631— Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of 
Prophesy ino, 1647.-1^. Herrick, Hesperides, 1648— 
Hobbe's Leviathan, 1651- — T. Fuller's Church History, 
1656. _J. Milton, born 1608 ; First Poem, 1626 ; V Allegro, 
1632 ; Comus and Lycidas, 1634-1637 ; Prose writings and 
most of the Sonnets, 1640-1660 ; Paradise Lost, 1667 ; 
Paradise Regaiited 2lvA Sa7?ison Agonistes, 1671 ; dies 1674- 
- Bunyan's Pilgri??i's Progress, 1678-1684- 

92. The Decline of the Elizabethan Litera- 
ture» — Prose. — We have traced in the last chapter 
the decline of the drama of Elizabeth up to the date 
of the Restoration. All poetry suffered in the same 
way after the reign of James I. It became fantastic 
in style and overwrought in thought. It was diffuse, 
or violent, in expression. Prose literature, on the con- 
trary, gradually grew into greater excellence, spread 
itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a 
greater variety of subjects. The grave national 
struggle, while it lessened poetical, increased prose 
literature. The painting of short '' Characters'*'' was 
begun by Sir T. Overbury's book in 16 14, and car- 
ried on by John Earle and Joseph Hall, afterwards 
made bishops. They mark the interest in individual 
life which now began to arise, and which soon took 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 95 

form in Biography. Thomas Fuller's Holy and 
Pj'ofane State^ 1642, added to sketches of ''charac- 
ters," illustrations of them in the lives of famous per- 
sons, and in 1662 his Worthies of Engla?id ^t\\\ further 
set on foot the literature of Biography. 7 he histoi'ical 
literature which we have noticed already in the works 
of Raleigh and Bacon was carried on by Fuller in his 
Church History of Briiaiji^ 1656. He is a quaint and 
delightful writer ; good sense, piety, and inventive wit 
are woven together in his work. We may place to- 
gether Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy^ 1621, 
and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici^ 1642, and 
Fseiidodoxia as books which treat of miscellaneons 
subjects in a witty and learned fashion, but without 
any true scholarship. This kind of writing was greatly 
increased by the settijig up of libraries where men 
dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James 
I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bodley established the 
Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton a library 
now placed in the British Museum. A number of 
small writers took part in the Ptcritan and Church 
co7it7'Oversies^ among whom William Prynne, a violent 
Puritan, deserves to be mentioned for his Histrio- 
Mastix^ or Scourge of Players. 

But there were others on each side who rose above 
the war of party into the calm air of spiritual religion. 
Jeremy Taylor at the close of Charles I.'s reign 
published his Great Exemplar and his Holy Living 
and Holy Dying, and shortly afterwards his Sermons. 
They had been preceded in 1647 by his Liberty of 
Prophesying., in which he claimed full freedom of 
Biblical interpretation as the right of all, and asked 
for only one standard of faith — the Apostles' Creed. 
His work is especially literary. Weighty with argu- 
ment, his sermons and books of devotion are still 
read among us for their sweet and deep devotion, for 
their rapidly flowing and poetic eloquence. Towards 
the end of the Civil Wars Richard Baxter, the great 

9 



96 ENGLISH LITER A JURE, [chap. 

Puritan writer, wrote a little book which, as it still re- 
mains a household book in England, takes its place 
in literature. There are few cottages which do not 
possess a copy of The Sainfs Everlasting Rest ; and 
there are few parsonages in England in which Robert 
I.eighton's book on the Epistle of St. Peter is not 
also to be found. Leighton died in 1684, Archbishop 
of Glasgow. In philosophic literature I have already 
spoken of Bacon, and of the poHtical writers, such as 
Hobbes and Harrington, who wrote during the Com- 
monwealth, I will speak hereafter in their proper 
place. 

Miscellaneous writing is further represented in the 
llteraticre of travel by George Sandys and Thomas Cor- 
yat. Coryafs Crudities^ 161 1, describes his journey 
tiirough France and Italy; Sandys' book, 1615, a jour- 
ney to the East. We have also from abroad some in- 
teresting letters from Sir Henry Wotton, and he gave 
Milton introductions to famous men in Italy. Wotton's 
quaint and pleasant friend Izaak Waltun closes the 
list of these pre- Restoration writers with the Compleat 
Angler^ 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint 
and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling 
rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest 
in the country which now began to grow up in England. 

The style of all these writers links them to the age 
of Elizabeth. It did not follow the weighty gravity 
of Hooker, or the balanced calhi and splendour of 
Bacon, but rather the witty quaintness of Lyly and 
of Sydney. The prose of men like Browne and 
Burton and Fuller is not as poetic as that of these 
Elizabethan writers, but it is just as fanciful. Even 
the prose of Jeremy Taylor is over poetical, and 
though it has all the Elizabethan ardour, it has also 
the EHzabethan faults of excessive wordiness and 
involved periods and images. It never knows where 
to stop. Milton's prose works, which shall be men- 
tioned in their place in his life, are also Elizabethan 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 97 

in style. Their style has the fire and violence, the 
eloquence and diffuseness, of the earlier literature, 
but in spite of the praise it has received, it is in 
reality scarcely to be called a style. It has all the 
faults a prose style can have except obscurity and vul- 
garity. Its bursts of eloquence ought to be in poetry, 
and it never charms except when Milton becomes 
purposely simple in personal narrative. There is no 
pure style in prose writing till Hobbes began to write 
m English, indeed we may say till after the Restora- 
tion, unless we except, on grounds of weight and 
power, the styles of Bacon and Hooker. 

93. The Decline of Poetry. — The various ele- 
ments which we have noticed in the poetry of Ehza- 
beth's reign, without the exception, even, of the 
slight Catholic element, though opposed to each 
other were filled with one spirit — the love of England 
and the Queen. Nor were they ever sharply divided ; 
they are found mixed together and modifying one 
another in the same poet, as for instance Puritanism 
and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in 
Constable ; and all are mixed together in Shakespeare 
and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry 
became less and less after the Queen's death. The 
elements remained, but they were separated. Poetry 
was the bundle of sticks with the cord round it in 
EHzabeth's time ; in the time of Charles I. it was 
the same bundle with the cord removed and the 
sticks set apart. The cause of this was that the 
strife, in politics between the Divine Right of Kings 
and Liberty, and in religion between the Church and 
the Puritans, grew so defined and intense that En- 
gland ceased to be at one, and the poets, though not 
so strongly as other classes, were separated into sec- 
tions. A certain style, which induced Johnson to 
call them *' metaphysical^' belongs more or less to all 
these poets. They were those, Hallam says, "'who 
laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought, 



98 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

usually false, and resting on some equ'ivocation of 
language or exceedingly remote analogy." This form 
finds its true source in the fantastic style of the Eiiphues 
and the Arcadia. It grew up again towards the close of 
EHzabeth's reign and it ended by greatly lessening good 
sense and clearness in English poetry. It was in the 
reaction from it, and in the determination to bring 
clear thought and clear expression of thought into 
English verse, that the school of Dryden and Pope — 
the critical school — began. The poetry from the 
later years of EUzabeth to Milton illustrates all these 
remarks. 

94. The Lyric Poetry struck a new note in the 
songs of Ben Jonson, such as the Hymn to Diana, 
They are less natural, less able to be sung than 
Shakespeare's, more classical, more artificial But they 
have no special tendency. Later on, during the reign 
of Charles L, and during the Civil War, the lyrics of 
William Carew, Sir John Suckling, Colonel Love- 
lace, and Robert Herrick, w^iose Hesperides was 
published in 1648, have a special royalist and court 
character. They are, for the most part, light, pleasant, 
short songs and epigrams on the passing interests of 
the day, on the charms of the court beauties, on a 
lock of hair, a dress, on all the fleeting forms of 
fleeting love. Here and there we find a pure or 
pathetic song, and there are few of them which time 
has selected that do not possess a gay or a gentle 
grace. As the Civil War deepened, the special 
court poetry died, and the songs became songs of 
battle and marching, and devoted and violent loyalty. 
These have been lately collected under the title of 
Songs of the Cavaliers. 

95. Satirical Poetry, always arising when natural 
passion in poetry decays, is represented in the later 
days of Elizabeth by Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop 
Hall, whose Virgide??iiaru7n, 1597, satires partly in 
poetry, make him the master satirist of this time. John 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTOKATIOX. gc) 

Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, who also partly belongs to 
the age of Elizabeth, was, with John Cleveland (a 
furious royalist and satirist of Charles I.'s time), the 
most obscure and fanciful of the poets absurdly called 
Metaphysical. Donne, however, rose far above the 
rest in the beauty of thought and in the tenderness of 
his religious and love poems. His satires are graphic 
pictures of the manners of the age of James I. George 
Wither hit the folHes and vices of the day so hard in 
his Abuses ShHpt and Whipt^ 1613, that he was put 
into the Marshalsea prison and there continued his 
satires in the Shephe7'd's Himting. As the Puritan 
and the Royalist became more opposed to one another, 
satirical poetry naturally became more bitter ; but, like 
the poetry of the Civil War, it took the form of short 
songs and pieces which went about the country, as 
those of Bishop Corbet did, in manuscript. 

96. The Rural Poetry. — The /^^-/^r^/ now began 
to take a more truly rural form than the conventional 
pastorals of France and Italy out of which it rose. 
In William Browne's Biitannia's Fasto7'als, 16 16, the 
element of pleasure in country life arises, and from 
this time it begins to grow in our poetry. It appears 
slightly in Wither's Shephe7'd's Huntings but plainly 
in his Mish'css of Philarete^ a poem interspersed with 
lyrics. In dwelling so much as he did on the beauty 
of natural scenery away from cities he brings a new 
element into English verse. Henceforth we always 
find a country poetry set over against a town poetry, a 
poetry of natttre set over against a poetry of man. It is 
still stronger in Andrew Marvell, Milton's secretary, 
who, with the exception of Milton, did the finest work 
of this kind. In imaginative intensity, in the fusing to- 
gether of personal feeling and thought with the delight 
received from nature, his verses on The Emigrants in 
ihe Bcjimidas and The Thoughts in a Garden, and the 
little poem, The Girl describes her Fawn, are like the 
work of Wordsworth on one side, and like the best 



lOO ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

Elizabethan work on the other. They are the last 
and the truest echo of the lyrics of the time of Ehza- 
beth, but they reach beyond them in the love of 
nature. 

97. Spenserians. — Among these broken up forms 
of poetry, there was one kind which was imitative of 
Spenser. Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, 
Henry More in his Platonical Song of the Soul, 
1642, and John Chalkhill in his Thealma, owned 
him as their master. The Purple ]sla?id, 1633, of the 
first, an elaborate allegory of the body and mind of 
man, has some grace and sweetness, and tells us that 
the scientific element which after the Restoration 
took form in the setting up of the Royal Society was 
so far spread in England at his time as to influence 
the poets. 

98. Religious Poetry. — The Temptation and 
Victory of Christy 16 10, of Giles Fletcher, is said to 
have given some hints to Milton for the Paradise Re- 
gained, and is one of the many religious poems that 
now began to interest the people. Of all these The 
Temple, 1631, of George Herbert, rector of Bemer- 
ton, has been the most popular. The purity and pro- 
found devotion of its poems have made it dear to all. 
Its gentle Church feeling has pleased all classes of 
churchmen ; its great quaintness which removes it 
from true poetry has added perhaps to its charm. 
With him we must rank Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, 
whose Sacred Poems are equally devotional, pure, and 
quaint, and Francis Quarles, whose Divine Emblems, 
1635, is still read in the cottages of England. On the 
Roman Catholic side, William Habington mingled 
his devotion to his religion with the praises of his 
wife under the name of Castara, 1634; and Richard 
Crashaw, whose rich inventiveness was not made less 
rich by the religious mysticism which finally led him 
to become a Roman Catholic, published his Steps to 
the Temple m 1646. On the Puritan side, we may 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. loi 

now place George Wither, whose Hallelujah^ 1641, 
a series of religious poems, was sent forth just 
before the Civil War began, when he left the king's 
side to support the Parliament. Finally, religious 
poetry, after the return of Charles II. passed on 
through the Davideis of Abraham Cowley, and the 
Divim Love of Edmund Waller to find its highest 
expression in the Paradise Lost, We have thus traced 
through all its forms the decline of poetry. It is a 
poetry often beautiful, but as often spoiled by obscurity, 
over-fancifulness, confusion of thought and of images. 
From this decay we pass into, a new created world 
when we come to speak of Milton. Between the 
dying poetry of the past, and the uprising of a new 
kind of poetry in Dryden, stands alone the majestic 
work of a great genius who touches the Elizabethan 
time with one hand and our own time with the 
other. 

99. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans, 
and, except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. 
Born in 1608, in Bread-street, he may have seen Shake- 
speare, for he remained till he was sixteen in London. 
His literary life may be said to begin with his entrance 
into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the accession 
of Charles I. Nicknamed the ^Mady" from his 
beauty and delicate taste and moraUty, he got soon 
a great fame, and during the seven years of his life 
at the university his poetic genius opened itself in the' 
English poems of which I give the dates. On the 
Death of a Fair Lnfa?it, 1626. At a Vacation Exer- 
cise^ 1628. On the Morning of Ch?'isfs JSativity^ 1629. 
On the Circicmcisiofi^ The Passion^ Time, At a Solemn 
Musick, On the May Morning, On Shakespeare, 1630. 
On the University Carrier, Epitaph on Marchioness of 
Worcester, Sonnet, i., 2o the Nightingale, Sonnet, 2., 
On Arriving at Age of T^venty -three, 1631. The 
last . sonnet, when explained by a letter that accom- 
panied it, shows that Milton, influenced by the 



102 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

persecution of the Puritans, had given up his inten- 
tion of becoming a clergyman. He left therefore the 
university in 1632, and went to live at Horton, 
near Windsor, where he spent five years, steadily 
reading the Greek and Latin writers, and amusing 
himself with mathematics and music. Poetry was 
not neglected. The L Allegro and // Fenseroso 
were written in 1632 and probably the Arcades: 
CoiniLs in 1634, and Lycidas in 1637. They all 
prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart, 
his Puritanism was of that earlier type which 
neither disdained literature, art, or gaiety, nor de- 
spised the ancient Church, nor turned away from- 
natural beauty. He could still enjoy the village 
dance, the masque, the hsts, the music in the dim 
Cathedral ; he could still mingle the learning of 
the Renaissance with his delight in the fields and 
flowers, with his feasting and his grief. He was as 
much the child of the New Learning as Spenser was, 
but his Puritanism was set deeper than Spenser*s. 

In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so 
many of the English poets, and visited the great towns, 
making friends in Florence where he saw Galileo, 
and in Rome. At Naples he heard the sad news 
of civil war, which determined him to return ; " inas- 
much as I thought it base to be travelling at my ease 
for intellectual culture, v/hile my fellow-countrymen 
at home were fighting for liberty.'' But, hearing that 
the war had not yet arisen, he remained in Italy till 
the end of 1639, and at the meeting of the Long 
Parliament we find him in a house in Aldersgate, 
w^here he lived till 1645. He had. projected while 
abroad, a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur 
(again the Welsh subject returns), but in London 
his mind changed, and among a number of subjects, 
tended at last to Pai^adise Z^j-/, which he meant to 
throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics 
and choruses. 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION, 103 

100. Milton's Prose, The Commonwealth. 

— Suddenly his whole life changed, and for twenty 
years — 1640- 1660 — he was carried out of art into 
politics, oat of poetry into prose. Before 1642, when 
the Civil War began, he had wTitten five vigorous 
pamphlets against episcopacy. Six more pamphlets 
appeared in the next two years. One of these was 
the Areopagitica ; ok Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printings 1644, a bold and eloquent attack on 
the censorship of the press by the Presbyterians. 
The four pamphlets in which he advocated conditional 
divorce made him still more the horror of the Presby- 
terians, When on the execution of the king, 1649, 
England became a republic Milton defended the act, 
in an answer to the Eikon Basilike (a portraiture of 
the sufferings of the king by Dr. Gauden), and con- 
tinued to defend it in his famous Latin Defence for the 
People of England (165 1), in which he inflicted so 
pitiless a lashing on Salmasius, the great Leyden 
scholar, that his fame went over the whole of Europe. 
In the next year he wholly lost his sight. But he 
continued his work when Cromwell was made Pro- 
tector, and wrote another Defence for the English 
People, and a further defence of himself against 
scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 
1655. In the last year of the Protector's life he 
began the Paradise Lost, about the date of the last 
of his sonnets. The two years that came before the 
Restoration were employed in a fruitless effort to 
prevent it by the publication of six more pamphlets. 
It was a wonder he was not put to death, and he was 
in hiding and in custody for a time. At last he 
settled in a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that 
Paradise Lost was finished, before the end of 1665, 
and then published in 1667. 

1 01. Paradise Lost. — We may perhaps regret 
that our greatest poet was shut away from his art 
for twenty years during which no verse was written 



i04 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

but the sonnets. But it may be that the poems 
he wrote, when the great cause he fought for had 
closed in seeming defeat but real victory, gained 
from its solemn issues and from the moral grandeur 
with which he wrought for its ends their majestic 
movement, their grand style, and their grave beauty. 
During the struggle he had never forgotten his art. 
" I may one day hope," he said, speaking of his 
youthful studies, "to have ye again, in a still time, 
when there shall be no chiding. Not in tliese 
Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sub- 
limity which is kept in Paradise Lost, It opens with 
the awaking of the rebel angels in Hell after their fall 
from Heaven, the consultation of their chiefs how 
best to carry on the war with God, and the resolve of 
Satan to go forth and tempt newly created man to 
fall. He takes his flight to the earth and finds Eden. 
Eden is then described, and Adam and Eve in their 
innocence. The next four books, from the fifth to 
the eighth, contain the Archangel Raphael's story of 
the war in heaven, the fall of Satan, and the creation 
of the world. The last four books describe the temp- 
tation, and the fall of Man, the vision shown by 
Michael to Adam of the future, and of the redemption 
of Man by Christ, and the expulsion from Paradise. 

As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness 
and grace of Milton's youthful time is gone. The 
beauty of the poem is rather that of ideal purity, and 
of sublime thought expressed in language which has 
the severe loveliness of the best Greek sculpture. The 
interest collects round the character of Satan at first, 
but he grows more and more mean as the poem goes 
on, and seems to fall a second time, to lose all his 
original brightness, after his temptation of Eve. In- 
deed this second degradation of Satan after he has 
not only sinned himself but made innocence sin, and 
beaten back in himself the last remains of good, is 
one. of the finest motives in the poem. At last all 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION, 105 

thought and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, 
until the closing lines leave us with their lonely image 
on our minds. In every part of the poem, in every 
character in it (as indeed), in all his poems, Milton's 
intense individuality appears. It is a pleasure to find 
it. The egotism of such a man, said Coleridge, is a 
revelation of spirit 

102. Milton's Later Poems. — It was followed 
by Paradise Regained and Sainson Agonistes^ published 
together in 167 1. Paradise Regained opens with the 
journey of Christ into the wilderness after his baptism, 
and its four books describe the temptation of Christ 
by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Re- 
deemer. The speeches in it drown the action, and 
their learned argument is only relieved by a few de- 
scriptions; but these, as in that of Athens, are done 
with Milton's highest power. The same solemn beauty 
of a quiet mind and a more severe style than that of 
Paradise Lost make us feel in it that Milton has grown 
older. 

In Samson Ago?iistes, the style is still severer, even 
to the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone 
tends to modify. It is a choral drama, after the 
Greek model. Samson in his blindness is described, 
is called on to make sport for the Philistines, and 
overthrows them in the end. He represents the 
fallen Puritan cause, and his victory in death Mil- 
ton's hopes for its final triumph. The poem has all 
the grandeur of the last words of a great man in 
whom there was now " calm of mind, all passion 
spent" He wrote it blind and old and fallen on evil 
days. But in it, as in the others, blindness did not 
prevent sight No man saw more vividly and could 
say more vividly what he saw. Nor did age make 
him lose strength. The force of thought and verse in 
his last poem is only less than in Paradise Lost Nor 
did evil days touch his imagination with weakness. 



io6 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

or make less the dignity of his art. Till the end 
it was 

** An undisturbed song of pure consent, 
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne. 
To Him that sits theieon." 

It ended in his death, November 1674. 

103. His Work. — To the greatness of the artist 
Milton joined the majesty of a pure and lofty 
character. His poetic style was as lofty as his 
character, and proceeded from it. Living at a time 
when criticism began to purify the verse of Eng- 
land, and being himself well acquainted with the 
great classical models, his work is free from the 
false conceits and the intemperance of the Elizabethan 
writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, and as 
various. He has their grace, naturalness, and inten- 
sity, when he chooses, and he adds to it a sublime 
dignity which they did not possess. All the kinds 
of poetry which he touched, he touched with the 
ease of great strength, and with so much weight, 
that they became new in his hands. He put a 
new life into the masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the 
descriptive lyric, the song, the choral drama; andJie 
created the epic in England. The lighter love poem 
he never wrote, and he kept satire for prose. In 
some points he was untrue to his descent from the 
Elizabethans, for he had no dramatic faculty and he 
had no humour. He summed up in himself all the 
higher influences of the Renaissance, and when they 
had died in England revived and handed them to 
us. His taste was as severe, his verse as polished, 
his method and language as strict as those of the 
school of Dryden and Pope that grew up when he was 
old. A literary past and present thus met in him, 
nor did he fail, like all the greatest men, to make a 
cast into the future. He began that pure poetry of 
natural description which has no higher examples to 



v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 107 

show in Wordsworth or Scott or Keats than his 
L' Allegro and // Fense?vso, Lastly, he did not re- 
present in any way the England that followed the 
tyranny, the coarseness, the sensuality, the falseness,, 
or the irreligion of the Stuarts, but he did represent 
Puritan England, and the whole career of Puritanism 
from its cradle to its grave. 

104. The Pilgrim's Progress. — With Milton 
the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry and 
the spirit of the New Learning said their last word. We 
might say that Puritanism also said its last great word& 
with him, were it not that its spirit lasted in English 
life, were it not also that four years after his death, in 
1678, John Bunyan, who had previously written much,, 
published the Pilgrim's Progress, It is the journey of 
Christian, the Pilgrim, from the City of Destruction, 
to the Celestial City. The seco?id part was published 
in 1684, and in 1682, the allegory of the Holy Wan 
I class the Pilg?Hm's Progress here, because in its 
imaginative fervour and poetry, and in its quality 
of naturalness, it belongs to the spirit oi the Eliza- 
bethan times. It belongs also to that time in 
this, that its simple and clear form grew up out 
of passionate feeling and not out of self-conscious 
art. It is a people's book and not the book of a 
literary class, and yet it lives in literature because 
it first revealed the poetry which fervent belief in a. 
spiritual world can kindle in the rudest hearts. In 
doing this, and in painting the various changes and' 
feelings of the pilgrim's progress towards God, the 
book touched the deepest human interests, and set on 
foot a new and plentiful literature. Its language is 
the language of the Bible. It is a prose allegory con- 
ceived as an epic poem. As such, it admits the vivid 
dramatic dialogue, the episodes, the descriptions,- and 
the clear drawing of types of character which give a 
different, but an equal pleasure to a peasant boy 
and to an intellect like Lord Macaulay's. 
10 



io8 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [chap. 



CHAPTER VI. 

FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 

1660-1760. 

Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill, 1643. — Hobbe's Leviathan^ 
1651.— Butler's Hudibras, 1663.— J. Dryden, bora 1631 ; 
his Dramas begin, 1663 ; Absalom and Ahitophd, 1681 ; 
Bind and Panther, 1687; Fables and death, 1700- — 
Wycherley, Congreve, F'arquhar, and Vanbragh, Dramas, 
from 1672-1726.— Newton's Principia, 1687.~Locke's 
Essay on the Human Understanding, 1690- — Alexander 
Pope, born 1688 ; Pastorals, 1709; Rape of the Lock, 1712 ; 
//(^w^;- finished, 1725 ; Essay on Man, 1732-1734 ; Dun- 
ciad finished, 1741 ; dies, 1744.— Swift's Tale of a Tub, 
1704 ; Gulliver's Travels, 1726- —Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 
1719. — Steele and Addison, Spectator, 1711.— Addison's 
Cato, 1713. —Johnson's /r^^^, 1749-- Sheridan and Gold- 
smith's Plays, 1768-1778. 

THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION AND 
REVOLUTION. 

105. Poetry. Change of Style. — We have seen 
the natural style as distinguished from the artificial in 
the Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural 
but artistic when it was used by a great genius like 
Shakespeare or Spenser, for a first rate poet creates 
rules of art ; his work itself is art. But when the art 
of poetry is making, its rules are not laid down, and 
the second rate poets, inspired only by their feel- 
ings, will write in a natural style unrestrained by 
rules, that is, they will put their feelings into verse 
without caring much for the form in which they do it. 
As long as they live in the midst of a youthful national 
life, and feel an ardent sympathy with it, their style 



VI.] THE RESTORATION' TO GEORGE JIT 109 

will be fresh and impassioned, and give pleasure be- 
cause of the strong feeling that inspires it. But it 
will also be extravagant and unrestrained in its use of 
images and words, because of its want of art. This is 
the history of the style of the poets of the middle 
period of Elizabeth's reign. (2) Afterwards the na- 
tional Itfe grew chill, and the feelings of the poets 
also chill. Then the want of art in the style made 
itself felt. The far-fetched images, the hazarded 
meanings, the over-fanciful way of putting thoughts, 
the sensational expression of feeling, in which the 
EUzabethan poets indulged, not only appeared in 
all their ugliness when they were inspired by no 
warm feelings but were indulged in far more than 
before. Men tried to produce by extravagant use 
of words the same results that living feehng had 
produced, and the more they failed the more ex- 
travagant and fantastic they became, till at last 
their poetry ceased to have clear meaning. This is 
the history of the style of the poets from the later 
days of Elizabeth till the Civil War. (3) The natural 
style, unregulated by art, had thus become unnatural. 
When it had reached that point, men began to feel 
how necessary it was that the style of poetry should 
be subjected to the rules of art, and two influences 
partly caused and partly supported this desire. One 
was the influence of Milton. Milton, first by his 
genius, which as I said creates of itself an artistic 
style, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation 
of the great classical models was able to give the 
first example in England of a pure, grand, and 
finished style, and in blank verse and the sonnet, 
wrote for the first time with absolute correctness. 
Another influence was that of the movement all over 
Europe towards inquiry into the right way of doing 
things, and into the truth of things, a movement we 
shall soon see at work in science, politics, and religion. 
In poetry it produced a school of criticism which 



I lo ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

first took form in France, and the influence ofBoileau, 
La Fontaine, and others who were striving after 
greater finish and neatness of expression told on Eng- 
land now. It is an influence which has been ex- 
aggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre " 
of Boileau side by side with Dryden's "long re- 
sounding march and energy divine " of verse. Our 
critical school of poets have no French quaHties in 
them even when they imitate the French. (4) Further, 
our own poets had already, before the Restoration, 
begun the critical work, and the French influence 
served only to give it a greater impulse. We shall 
see the growth of a colder and more correct spirit of 
art in Cowley, Denham, and Waller. Vigorous form 
was given to that spirit by Dryden, and perfection 
of artifice added to it by Pope. The artificial style 
succeeded to and extinguished the natural. 

106. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject 
of the Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the 
Passions ^ 2LXiA it was treated from the side of natural 
feeling. This was fully and splendidly done by Shake- 
speare. But after a time the subject followed, as we 
have seen in speaking of the drama, the same career 
as the style. It was treated in an extravagant and 
sensational manner, and the representation of the pas- 
sions tended to become, and did become unnatural or 
fantastic. Milton alone redeemed the subject from 
this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natural 
manner of the passions of the human heart, and he 
introduced the religious passions of love of God, 
sorrow for sin, and others, into English poetry. But with 
him the subject of man as influenced by the passions 
died for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers, 
turned to another. They left the passions aside, and 
wrote of the things in which the intellect and the con- 
science, the social and political instincts in man 
were interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, 
philosophical, and party poetry of a new school arose. 



VI.] THE RESTORATION- TO GEORGE III, in 

107. Transition Poets. — There were a few- 
poets, writing partly before and partly after the Re- 
storation, who represent the passage from the fantastic 
to the more correct style. Abraham Cowley was one 
of these. His love poems, T'he Mistress, 1647, are 
courtly, witty, and have some of the Elizabethan 
imagination. His later poems, owing probably to 
his life in France, were more exact in verse, and 
more cold in form. The same may be said of Edmund 
Waller, who '' first made writing in rhyme easily 
an art.'^ He also lived a long time in France, and 
died in 1687. Sir Jno. Denham's Cooper's Hill, 1643, 
was a favouiite with Dryden for the " majesty of 
its style." It may rank as one of the first of our 
descriptive poems, and its didactic reflectiveness, 
and the chill stream of its verse and thought, link 
him closely to Pope. Sir W. Davenant's Go7idiberi, 
165 1, an heroic poem, is perhaps the most striking 
example of this transition. Worthless as poetry, it 
represents the new interest in political philosophy 
and in science that was arising, and preludes the intel- 
lectual poetry. Its preface discourses of rime and the 
rules of art, and represents the new critical influence 
which came over Avith the exiled court from France. 
The critical school had therefore begun even before 
Dryden's poems were written. The change was less 
sudden than it seemed. 

Sadric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was 
made during this transition time into a powerful weapon 
by two men, each on a difl"erent side. Andrew MarvelFs 
Satires, after the Restoration, represent the Puritan's 
wrath with the vices of the court and king, and his 
shame for the disgrace of England among the nations. 
The Hiidibras oi^KMXiYA. Butler, in 1663, represents 
the fierce reaction which had set in against Puritanism. 
It is justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and 
ingenious drollery, and in accordance with the new 
criticism, it is absolutely without obscurity. It is 



1 1 2 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

often as terse as Pope's best work. But it is too 
long, its wit wearies us at last, and it undoes the force 
of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration. Satire 
should have at least the semblance of truth ; yet Butler 
calls the Puritans cowards. We turn now to the first 
of these poets in whom poetry is founded on intellect 
rather than on feeling, and whose best verse is devoted 
to argument and satire. 

io8. John Dryden was the first of the new, as 
Milton was the last of the elder, school of poetry. 
It was late in life that he gained fame. Born in 
163 1, he was a Cromwellite till the Restoration, when 
he began the changes which mark his life. His 
poem on the death of the Protector was soon fol- 
lowed by the Astrcea Redux which celebrated the 
return of justice to the realm in the person of 
Charles II. The Annies Mtj-abilis appeared in 1667, 
and in this his great power was first clearly shown. 
It is the power of clear reasoning expressing 
itself with entire ease in a rapid succession of con- 
densed thoughts in verse. Such a power fitted Dryden 
for satire, and his Absalotn and Achitophel is the fore- 
most of English satires. He had been a playwriter 
till its appearance in 1681, and the rimed plays 
which he had written enabled him to perfect the versi- 
fication which is so remarkable in it and the poems 
that followed. The satire itself, written in mockery 
of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked 
Shaftesbury as Ahitophel, was kind to Monmouth as 
Absalom, and in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri 
the poet avenged himself for the Rehearsal, It 
was the first fine example of that party poetry which 
became still more bitter and personal in the hands 
of Pope. It was followed by the Medal, a new at- 
tack on Shaftesbury, and the Mac Flecknoe, in which 
Shadwell, a rival poet, who had supported Shaftes- 
bury's party, was made a laughing-stock. After these 
Dryden taug^it theology in verse, and the Religio 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 113 

Lata, 1682, defends, and states the argument for, 
the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty 
that drove him on the accession of James II. to 
change his reUgion, and the Hind and Panther, 1687, 
is as fine a model of clear reasoning in behalf of 
the milk-white hind of the Church of Rome, as 
the Religio Laid was in behalf of the Church of 
England, which now becomes the spotted panther. 
As a narrative poet his fables and translations, pro- 
duced late in life, in 1700, give him a high rank, 
though the fine harmony of their verse does not win 
us to forget their coarseness, and their lack of that 
skill in arranging a story which comes from imagi- 
native feeling. As a lyric poet his fame rests on 
the animated Ode for St, Cecilia's Day, His trans- 
lation of Vergil has fire, but wants the dignity and 
tenderness of the original. From Milton's death till 
his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, and 
round his throne in WilFs Coffeehouse where he sat 
as *^ Glorious John " we may place the names of the 
lesser poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and 
Mulgrave, Sir Charles Scdley, and the Earl of Roches- 
ter. The lighter poetry of the court lived on in the 
two last. John Oldham won a short fame by his 
Satires on the Jesuits, 1679 ; and Bishop Ken, 1668, set 
on foot, in his Mortiing and Evening Hymns ^ a new 
type of religious poetry. 

109. The Drama of the Restoration. — The 
change that now passed over literature was as great in 
the drama as in poetry. Two acting companies were 
formed on the king's return under Thomas Killigrew 
and Davenant : actresses came on the stage for the 
first time, and scenery began to be used. Dryden 
began his dramatic work with comedies, 1663, but 
soon after, following Corneille, though he abjured 
French influence, made rime instead of blank verse 
the vehicle of tragedy. His tragedies, like the rest of 
the time, were written in a pompous heroic style. The 



114 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

Duke of Buckingham ridiculed them in the Rehearsal^ 
1671, and sometime after Dryden changed his style, 
and wrote in another manner, of which All for Love, 
and the Spanish Friar, are perhaps the best examples. 
His plays have but little sentiment, for Dryden's 
treatment of the emotions is always brutal, but they 
have some neat intrigue, some fine passages. John 
Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, Nat. Lee's Rival Queens, 
and two pathetic tragedies by Thomas Otway, The 
Orphan and Venice P?rserved, are of the Restoration 
time and kept the stage. 

It was in Comedy that the dramatists of the Restora- 
tion excelled. William Wycherley, whose gross 
vigour is remarkable, introduced the prose Comedy 
of Manners, in 1672, and Mrs. Behn, Sir George 
Etherege, and others, carried it on to the Revolution. 
The wit of their comedies is the wit of a vulgar and 
licentious society. After the Revolution, William 
CoNGREVE, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Far- 
QUAR made comedy more gentlemanly and its intrigue 
more subtle. Though without truth to nature, their 
plays sparkle with wit in every line. They exaggerate 
the vices of the time, but their immorality is partly 
forgotten in their swift and delightful gaiety. Poetry, 
however, was less an important part of literature 
during this period than prose. 

no. The Prose Literature. — I have said that 
towards the end of Elizabeth's reign men settled down 
to think and inquire. Intellectual had succeeded to 
active life. We have seen this in the poetry of the 
time ; and the great work of Bacon, which was then 
begun, represents the same thing in prose. He worked 
at not only all subjects of inquiry, but also at the 
right method of enquiry. The Adva?ice7nent of Learn- 
ing and the Novum Organum did not fulfil all he 
aimed at, but they did stir the whole of English intel- 
ligence into activity. In Science, the impulse he gave 
was only partly right, and the work of Science in Eng- 
land was behind that of the Continent. The religious 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 115 

and the political struggle absorbed the country, and it 
was not till after the Restoration, with two exceptions, 
that scientific discovery advanced so far as to claim 
recognition in a history of Literature. The Royal 
Society was embodied in 1662, and astronomy, expe- 
rimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology, 
botany, vegetable physiology were all founded as 
studies and their literature begun in the age of the 
Restoration. One man's work was so great in science 
as to merit his name being mentioned among the liter- 
ary men of England. In 167 1, Isaac Newton laid his 
Theory ' of Light before the Royal Society ; in the 
year before the Revolution his F^'inclpia established 
with its proof of the theory of gravitation the true 
system of the universe. 

It was in political and religious knowledge however 
that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most 
shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active 
and adventurous in a people, the first thing they will 
think upon is the true method and grounds of govern- 
ment, both divine and human. Two sides will be 
taken, the side of Authority and the side of Reason 
in Religion ; the side of Authority and the side of In- 
dividual Liberty in Politics. 

III. The Theological Literature of those who 
declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth, 
arose with some men who met at Lord Falkland's just 
before the civil war, and especially with John Hales and 
William Chillingworth. With them, Jeremy Taylor 
pleaded, as we have seen, the cause of religious liberty 
and toleration, and of rightness of life as more important 
than a correct theology. After the Restoration and Re- 
volution, their work was carried on by Bishop Burnet, 
Robert Boyle, the philosopher. Archbishop Tillotson, 
and Bishop Butler, whose Sermons and Analogy of 
Religion^ Natural and Revealed^ to the Constitution and 
Course of Nature, 1736, endeavour to make peace be- 
tween Authority and Reason. Many other divines of 



ii6 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chai'. 

the English Church took one side or another, or 
opposed the growing Deism. Isaac Barrow is to be 
mentioned for his sedate, Robert South for his fierce 
and witty eloquence, and in them, and in men like 
Edward Stillingfleet and William Sherlock, English 
theological prose took form. 

112. Political Literature. — The resistance to 
authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine 
Right of Kings did not enter into Literature till after 
it had been worked out practically in the Civil War. 
During the Commonwealth and after the Revolution it 
took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of 
the Science of Government, and was mingled with an in- 
quiry into the origin of society and the ground of social 
life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Commonwealth, was 
the first who dealt with the question from the side of 
reason alone, and he is also the first of all our prose 
writers whose style may be said to be uniform and 
correct, and adapted carefully to the subjects on which 
he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan^ 1651, declared 
(i) that the origin of all power was in the people, and 
(2) the end of all power was for the common weal. It 
destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and 
Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right 
when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the 
people could not be taken away by the people. Sir 
R. Filmer supported the side of Divine Right in his 
Fatnarcha, published, 1680. Henry Nevile in \i\^ Dia- 
logue concerning Govern7nent, and James Harrington in 
his romance The Coinmonwealth of Gceana, published 
at the beginning of the Commonwealth, contended that 
all secure government was to be based on property, but 
Nevile supported a monarchy, and Harrington — with 
whom I may class Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 — 
a democracy, on this basis. 

113, John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1689- 
1690 followed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his 
treatise on Civil Government, but with these important 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 117 

additions — (i) that the people have a right to take 
away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that 
the ruler is responsible to the people for the trust 
reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies 
yre Supreme as the voice of the people. This was 
the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke 
carried the same spirit of free inquiry into the realm 
of religion, and in his three Letters on Toleration 
1689-90-92, laid down the philosophical grounds for 
liberty of religious thought. He finished by entering 
the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 ap- 
peared his Essay concerning the Human Understandings 
m which he investigated its limits and traced all ideas 
and therefore all knowledge to experience. In his 
clear statement of the way in which the Understand- 
ing works, in the way in which he guarded it and Lan- 
guage against their errors in the inquiry after truth, 
he did as much for the true method of thinking as 
Bacon had done for the Science of nature. 

1 1 4. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart 
from the great movement of thought, a good deal of 
Miscellaneous Literature. Sir William Petty, in 
1667, made the first effort after a science of political 
economy in his Treatise on Taxes, Characters, essays, 
letter-writing, memoirs, all come to the front. The paint- 
ing of short ** cha7'acters " was carried on after the 
Restoration by Saml. Butler, and W. Charleton. These 
** characters '^ had no personality, but as party spirit 
deepened, names thinly disguised were given to 
characters drawn of living men, and Dryden and Pope 
in poetry and all the prose wits of the time of Queen 
Anne and George I. made personal and often violent 
sketches of their opponents a special element in 
literature. After the Restoration, Cowley's small 
volume, and Dryden, in the masterly criticism on his 
art which he prefixed to some of his dramas, gave 
richness to the Essay, These two writers began — 
with Hobbes — the second period of English prose. 



1 1 8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the 
subject, and the proper words are put in their proper 
places. It is as different from the style that came 
before it, as the easy manners of a gentleman are from 
those of a learned man unaccustomed to society. In 
Wilham Ill's, time Sir W. Temple's pleasant Essays 
bring us in style and tone nearer to the great class of 
essayists of whom Addison was chief Lady Rachel 
Russell's Letters begin the letter-unitijig literature of 
England, in which Gray and Cowper, Byron and 
Beckford, have done the best work. Pepys (1660-69) 
and Evelyn, whose Diary grows full after 1640, begin 
that class of gossiping mejnoirs which have been of 
so much use in giving colour to history. History 
itself at this time is little better than ?nemoirs, and such 
a name may be fairly given to Clarendon's History of 
the Civil Wars (begun in 1641) and to Bishop 
Burnet's History of his ow?t Time and to his History 
of the Reformatio?t\hQg-ai[im 1679, completed in 1715). 
Finally classical criticism^ in the discussion on the 
genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris, was created 
by Richard Bentley in 1697-99. 

115. The Literature of Queen Anne and the 
first Georges. — With the closing years of William 
III. and the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a litera- 
ture arose which was partly new and partly a continu- 
ance of that of the Restoration. The conflict between 
those who took the oath to the new dynasty and the 
Nonjurors who refused, the hot blood that it produced, 
the war between Dissent and Church and between the 
two parties which now took the names of Whig and 
Tory, produced a mass of political pamphlets, of which 
Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the best ; of songs 
and ballads, like Lillibullero^ which were sung in every 
street ; of squibs, reviews, and satirical poems and 
letters. Everyone joined in it, and it rose into im- 
portance in the work of the greater men who mingled 
more literary studies with their political excitement. 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 119 

In politics all the abstract discussions we have men- 
tioned ceased to be abstract and became personal and 
practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more 
closely to the questions of everyday life. The whole 
of this stirring literary life was concentrated in London, 
where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is 
round this vivid city life that the Literature of Queen 
Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 

116. It was with a few exceptions a Party Litera- 
ture. The Whig and Tory leaders enhsted on their 
sides the best poets and prose writers, who fiercely 
satirized and unduly praised them under names thinly 
disguised. Personalities were sent to and fro like shots 
in battle. Those who could do this work well were well 
rewarded, but the rank and file of writers were left to 
starve. Literature was thus honoured not for itself, 
but for the sake of party. The result was that the 
abler men lowered it by making it a political tool, and 
the smaller men, the fry of Grub Street, degraded it 
by using it in the same way, only in a baser manner. 
Their flattery was as abject as their abuse was shame- 
less, and both were stupid. They received and de- 
served the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to 
give them in the Dimciad, Being a party literature, 
it naturally came to study and to look sharply into 
human character and into human life as seen in the 
great city. It discussed all the varieties of social 
life, and painted town society more vividly than 
has been done before or since ; and it was so wholly 
taken up with this that country life and its interests, 
except in the writings of Addison, was scarcely touched 
by it at all. The society of the day was one in which 
all subjects of intellectual and scientific inquiry were 
eagerly debated, and the wit of this society was 
stimulated by its party spirit. Its literature reflected 
this intellectual excitement, and at no time in our 
history was literary work so vigorous and masculine 
on the various problems of thought and know- 

11 



120 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

ledge. Criticism being so active, the form in which 
thought was expressed was now especially dw^elt on, 
and the result was that the style of English prose 
became for the first time absolutely simple and clear, 
and English verse reached a neatness of expression 
and a closeness of thought which was as exquisite as 
it was artificial. At the same time, and for the same 
reasons. Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in 
poetry. 

117. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all 
these elements. Born in 1688, he wrote excellent verse 
at twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared m 1709, 
and two years afterwards he took full rank as the 
critical poet in the Essay on Criticism (17 11). The 
next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the 
'*epos of society under Queen Anne," and the most 
brilliant play of wit in our language. This closed what 
we may call his first period. He now became known 
to Swift and to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, a 
statesman who was also a wTiter. With these, and with 
Gay, Parnell, Prior, and Arbuthnot, Pope formed the 
Scriblerus Club, and soon rose into great fame by his 
Translation of the Iliad a7td Odyssey under George I. 
(1715-1725), for which he received 7,000 pounds. 
He now, being at ease, lived at Twickenham, where he 
had completed his Homer. It was here, retired from 
the literary mob, that in bitter scorn of the many petty 
scribblers, he wrote in 1728 the Z>//;2^/(<7^, afterwards 
altered and enlarged, in 1741. It was the fiercest of 
his satires and it closes his second period, w^hich took 
much of its savageness from the influence of Swift. 
The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely 
linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It w^as in conver- 
sation with him that he originated the Essay on Man 
(1732-4), and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral 
Essays, or Epistles to men and women, were written to 
praise those whom he loved, and to satirize the bad 
poets and the social follies of the day, and all who 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE 111. 121 

disliked him or his party. In the last few years of his 
life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legatmi of 
Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the 
Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay o?t Man 
formed part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ; 
but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the 
members of his literary circle were dead, and a new 
race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he 
died. He is our greatest master in didactic poetry, 
not so much because of the worth of the thoughts, as 
because of the masterly form in which they are put. 
The Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor 
and not his own, is crowded with lines that have 
passed into daily use. The Essay on Criticisin is 
equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite 
skill. The Satii-es and Epistles are also didactic. 
They set virtue and cleverness over against vice and 
stupidity, and they illustrate both by types of character, 
in the drawing of which Pope is without a rival in our 
literature. His translation of Homer is made with 
great literary art, but for that very reason it does not 
make us feel the simplicity and directness of Homer. 
It has neither the manner of Homer, nor the spirit of 
the Greek life, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have 
neither the manner nor che spirit of nature. The heroic 
couplet, in which he wrote his translation and nearly 
all his work, he used in various subjects with a cor- 
rectness that has never been surpassed, but it some- 
times fails from being too smooth, and its cadences too 
regular. Finally, he was a true artist, hating those who 
degraded his art, and at a time when men followed it 
for money, and place, and the applause of the club 
and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end, for 
its own sake. 

118. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in 
the first two-thirds of his life did not write in his manner 
nor approach his genius. Thomas Parnell is known 
by his Hermit, and both he and John Gay, in his six 



1 22 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

pastorals, llie Shepherd's Week (17 14), touched on 
country life. Swift's poetical satires were coarse but 
always hit home ; Addison celebrated the battle of 
Blenheim in the Campaign^ and his sweet grace is 
found in some devotional pieces ; while Peior's charm- 
ing ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry 
which I may say began with him in the reign of William 
III. The Black-eyed Susan of Gay, and Tickell's Colin 
and Lticy diXidi Carey's Sally in our Alley ^2,x\d. afterwards 
Goldsmith's Ediuin and Angelina mark the rise of the 
modern ballad; a class of poetry wholly apart from 
the genius of Pope. When we next speak of the 
poets we shall see how during Pope's later hfe, an 
entirely new impulse came on poetry, and changed it 
root and branch. 

119. The Prose Literature of Pope's time col- 
lects itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, 
Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit 
those elements of the age of which I have spoken. 
Jonathan Swift was the keenest of political parti- 
zans. The Battle of the Books, or the literary fight 
about the Letters of Fhalaris, and the Tale of a 2ub, 
a satire on the Presbyterians and the Papists, made 
his reputation in 1704 and established him as a satirist. 
Swift left the AVhig for the Tory party, and his poli- 
tical tracts brought him Court favour and literary 
fame. On the fall of the Tory party at the acces- 
sion of George I., he retired to the Deanery of St. 
Patrick in Ireland an embittered man, and the Drapier's 
Letters (1724) written against Wood's halfpence, gained 
him popularity in a country that he hated. In 1726, 
his inventive genius, his savage satire, and his cruel 
indignation with life, were all shown in Gidliver's 
Trai^'els. The voyage to Lilliput and Brobdingnag 
satirized the politics and manners of England and 
Europe; that to Laputa mocked the philosophers; and 
the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, lacerated 
and defiled the whole body of humanity. No Enghsh 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE 21 L 123 

is more robust than Swift's, no wit more scathing, 
no I'fe in private and public more sad and proud, no 
death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly in- 
sane. Daniel Defoe was almost as vigorous a political 
writer as Swift, but he will live in literature by Robiii- 
son Crusoe (17 19). In it he equalled Gulliver's Travels 
in truthful representation, and excelled them in inven- 
tion. The story lives and charms from day to day. With 
his other tales it makes him our first fine writer of 
fiction. But none of his stories are true novels ; that 
is, they have no plot to the working out of which the 
characters and the events contribute. They form the 
transition however from the slight tale and the ro- 
mance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel 
of Richardson and Fielding. 

I2C. Metaphysical Literature was enriched by 
the w^ork of Bishop Berkeley. His Mt?iute Philoso- 
pher and other works questioned the real existence of 
matter, and founded on the denial of it an answer to 
the English Deists, round whom in the first half of 
the eighteenth century centred the struggle between 
the claims of natural and revealed religion. Shaftes- 
bury, Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and 
Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Clarke, 
by Bentley, whose name is best known as the founder 
of the true school of classical criticism, and by 
Bishop Warburton. I may mention here a social 
satire, The Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville, half poem, 
half prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to 
prove that the vices of society are the foundation of 
civilisation, and is the first of a new set of books 
which marked the rise in England of the bold specu- 
lations on the nature and ground of society which 
the French Revolution afterwards increased. 

121. The Periodical Essay is connected with the 
names of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. 
This gay, light, and graceful kind of literature, differ- 
ing from such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation 



1 24 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

about a subject differs from a clear analysis of all its 
points, was begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. 
Charles Cotton, a wit of Charles II/s time, re-translated 
Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators 
in Cowley, and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical 
Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was 
published three times a week, then daily, and it was 
anonymous, and both these characters necessarily 
changed its form from that of an Essay of Montaigne. 
Steele began it in the Tatler, 1709? ^.nd it treated of 
everything that was going on in the world. He 
paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen 
Anne — the political and literary disputes, the fine 
gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the 
humours of society, the new book, the new play ; we 
live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old 
London. Addison soon joined him, first in the 
Tailer, afterwards in the Spectator, 171 1. His work 
is more critical, literary, and didactic than his com- 
panion's. The characters he introduces, such as 
Roger de Coverley, are finished studies after nature, 
and their talk is easy and dramatic. No humour is 
more fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never 
bitter. The style adds to the charm : in its varied 
cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed ; 
and it seems to grow out of the subjects treated of 
Addison's work was a great one, lightly done. The 
Spectator, the Guardian, and the Freeholder, in his 
hands, gave a better tone to manners, and a gentler 
one to political and literary criticism. The essays 
published every Friday were chiefly on literary sub- 
jects, the Saturday essays chiefly on religious sub- 
jects. The former popularized literature, so that 
culture spread among the middle classes and crept 
down to the country ; the latter popularized religion. 
" I have brought," he says, *' philosophy out of closets 
and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs 
and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.' 



VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III, 125 

The next important series was Johnson's Rambler 
(1750-2) and Idler^ but in tliem lightness, the essence 
of this kind of Essay, was lost. Goldsmith's Citizen of 
the Worlds a series of letters supposed to be written 
by a Chinese traveller in England, and collected in 
1762, satirizes the manners and fashionable folHes 
of the time. Several other series followed but they 
are now unreadable. One man alone in our own 
century caught the old inspiration^ and with a humour 
less easy, as gentle, but more subtle than Addison's. 
It was Charles Lamb, in the Essays of Elia^ and the 
fineness of perception he showed in these was equally 
displayed in his criticisms on the old dramatists. 

122. The Drama. — During this time the Drama 
continued. Jeremy Collier's famous attack on the stage 
(1698) may have had some influence in purifying it, 
but it was really the growth of a higher tone of society 
which improved it. It grew dull in the stupid plays 
of Steele, in Addison's ponderous tragedy of Cato 
(17 13), and in the melancholy tragedies of Rowe 
(1700-13), whose name is, however, to be remem- 
bered as the first editor of Shakespeare, 1709-10. The 
four folio editions of Shakespeare had been previ- 
ously set forth in 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685. The 
Beggar's Opera (1728) of Gay introduced a new 
form of dramatic literature, and Colley Gibber carried 
on the lighter comedy into the reign of George 11. 
Fielding then made the stage the vehicle of criticism 
on the follies, literature, and politics of the time, 
and the actors Foote and Garrick did the same 
in their farces. Tragedy now trod the boards with 
the heavy foot of Johnson in his Iie?ie (1749), 
and Home's Douglas kept the stage. A number of 
sentimental comedies written by Mackhn, Murphy, 
Cumberland and the Colmans still survive, but the 
classic comedy can only be said to be represented 
by The Goodnattwed Ma7i and She Stoops to Conquer 
of Goldsmith, by The Rivals and the School for 



126 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

Scandal of Sheridan, all of which appeared between 
1768 and 1778. Both were Irishmen, but Goldsmith 
has m-ore of the Celtic grace, and Sheridan of the 
Celtic wit. With Sheridan we may say that the 
history of the English drama closes. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA. 

1760-1837. 

Richardson's Pamela, 1740 — Fielding's Joseph Andrnvs, 
1742- — Smollett's Roderick Random and Richardson's 
Clarissa Harlowe, 1748- — Fielding's Tom Jones , 1749- — 
Johnson's Dictio7iary, 1755. — Sterne's Tristrain Shandy, 
1759. — Hume's History of Ettglajid, completed 1761. — 
QoldLsmith'sVicar of Wakejield, 1766. — Adam Smith's Wealth 
of Nations, 1776- — G'lhhon'^ Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, completed 1788- — 'Bos^wQlVsLifeofJohfison, 1791. 
— Burke's W7'itings, from 1756-1797.— Miss Austin's Novels^ 
1811-1817.— Scott's Novels, 1814-1831. 

123. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of 
manufactures, science, and prosperity which began 
with the middle of the eighteenth century is paral- 
leled by the growth of Literature. The general causes 
of this growth were — 

ist, That a good prose style had been per- 
fected, and the method of writing being made easy, 
production increased. Men were born, as it were, 
into a good school of the art of composition, and 
the boy of eighteen had no difficulty in making sen- 
tences which the Elizabethan wTiter could not have 
put together after fifty years of study. 

2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the 
House of Hanover had left England at rest, and 
given it wealth. The reclaiming of waste tracts, the 



VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE IIL TO VICTORIA. 127 

increased wealth and trade, made better communica- 
tion necessary ; and the country was soon covered with 
a network of highways. The leisure gave time to 
men to think and write : the quicker interchange 
between the capital and the country spread over 
England the literature of the capital, and stirred men 
everywhere to write. The coaching services, and the 
post carried the new book and the literary criticism 
to the villages, and awoke the men of genius there, 
who might otherwise have been silent. 

3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of 
the day, and grew in importance till it contained the 
opinions and writings of men like Canning. Such 
seed produced literary work in the country. News- 
papers now began to play their part in literature. They 
rose under the Commonwealth, but became important 
when the censorship which reduced them to a mere 
broadsheet of news was removed after the Revolution 
of 1688. The political sleep of the age of the two 
first Georges hindered their progress ; but in the reign 
of George III., after a struggle with which the name of 
John Wilkes and the author of the letters of Junius are 
connected, the Press claimed and obtained the right to 
criticize the conduct and measures of Ministers and 
Parliament and the King ; and after the struggle in 
1771 the right to pubhsh and comment on the debates 
in the two Houses. The great English Journals, the 
Morning Chronicle^ the Post^ the Herald^ and the Times 
gave an enormous impulse within the next twenty years 
to the production of books, and created a new class of 
literary men — the Journalists. Later on, in 1802, the 
publication of the Edinburgh Revieiv^ and afterwards 
of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine^ 
started another kind of prose writing, and by their 
criticisms on new books improved and stimulated 
literature. 

4thly, Communication with the Continent 
had increased during the peaceable times of Walpolc, 



128 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

and the wars that followed made it still easier. With its 
increase, two new and great outbursts of literature told 
upon England. France sent the works of Montes- 
quieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, 
and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were called the 
Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken English 
literature on all the great subjects that belong to the 
social and political life of man. Afterwards, the fresh 
German movement, led by Lessing and others, and 
carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse 
to the poetical school that arose in England along 
with the French Revolution. These were the general 
causes of the rapid growth of literature from the time 
of George III. We turn now to the forms Literature 
took — first in Prose, then in Poetry. 

124. The Novel is perhaps the most remarkable. 
It began in the reign of George II. No books have 
ever produced so plentiful an offspring as the novels 
of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. The novel 
arranges and combines round the passion of love and 
its course between two or more persons a number of 
events and of characters which in their action on one 
another develop the plot of the story and bring about 
a sad or a happy close. The story may be laid at any 
time, in any class of society, in any place. The whole 
world and the whole of human life lies before it as its 
subject. Its vast sphere accounts for its vast produc- 
tion — its human interest for its vast numbers of readers. 

Samuel Richardson, while Pope was yet alive, wrote 
in the form of letters, and in two months' time Pamela 
(1740), and afterwards Clarissa Harlotve {y'jj^^), and 
Sir Charles Graiidisoiu The second is the best, and all 
are celebrated for their subtle and tender drawing of 
the human heart. They are novels of Sentiment; and 
their intense minuteness of detail gives them reality. 
Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett followed him 
with the novel of Real life, full of events, adventures, 
fun, and vivid painting of various kinds of life in 



VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE III, TO VICTORIA, 129 

England. Fielding began y^\\\\ Joseph Andrews (1742), 
Smollett with Roderick Random (1748). Both wrote 
many other stories, but in truth of representation of 
common hfe, and m the natural growth and winding 
up of the story, Fielding's Torn Jojies (1749) is our 
English masterpiece and model. Ten years then suf- 
ficed to create an entirely new literature. Laurence 
Sterne, in his Tristra7n Shandy^ (i7S9) introduced 
the novel of Character in which events are few. His 
peculiar vein of labyrinthine humour and falsetto 
sentiment has been imitated, but never attained. 
We mention Johnson's Rasselas (1759) as the first 
of our Didactic tales, and the Fool of Qicality^ by 
Henry Brooke, as the first of our Theological tales. 
Under George IH. new forms of fiction appeared — 
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (i^j 66) w^as the first, 
and perhaps the most charming, of all those novels 
which we may call Idyllic, which describe the loves 
and the simple lives of country people in country 
scenery. Miss Burney's Evelina (1778) and Cecilia 
w^ere the first novels of Society. Mrs. Inchbald's 
Simple Story (1791) introduced the novel of Passion, 
and Mrs. Radcliffe, in her wild and picturesque tales, 
the Romantic novel. The interest kindled in poHtical 
questions by the French Revolution showed itself in 
another class of novels, and the Political stories of 
Holcroft and William Godwin opened a new realm 
to the novelist, while the latter excluded love alto- 
gether from his story of Caleb Williams. Mrs. Opie 
made Domestic life the sphere of her graceful and 
pathetic stories (1806). Miss Edgeworth, in her Irish 
stories, gave the first impulse to the novel of National 
character, and in her other tales to the novel with a 
Moral purpose (i 801-181 1). Miss Austin, with '' an 
exquisite touch which renders commonplace things 
and characters interesting from truth of description 
and sentiment,*' produced the best stories we have 
of Everyday English society. Se7ise and Se?tsibility, 



I30 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

P7'ide and Prejudice^ Einnia^ Mansfield Fa7% and 
Persuasion^ were all written between 1811 and 181 7. 

Sir Walter Scott, the great Enchanter, now began 
the long series of his novels. Men are still alive who 
well remember the wonder and delight of the land 
when Wave7iey (18 14) was pubHshed. In the rapidity 
of his work Scott recalls the Elizabethan time. Guy 
Ma7inering^ his next tale, was written in six weeks. 
The Bride of Lamme7'7noor^ as great in fateful pathos 
as Ro7neo a7id Juliet, was done in a fortnight. His 
National tales, such as The Heart of Midlothian, and 
The A7itiquary, are written as if he saw directly all 
the characters and scenes, and when he saw them 
enjoyed them so much that he could not help writing 
them down. And the art with which this was done 
was so inspired, that since Shakespeare there is 
nothing we can compare to it. ^^ All is great in the 
Waverley Novels," says Goethe, " material, effects, 
characters, execution." In the vivid portraiture and 
dramatic story of such tales as Ke7iilwo7'th and Qtwttm 
Diirward, he created the Historical Novel. His 
last tale of power was the Fair Alaid of Perth in 
1828; his last effort in 1831 was made the year 
before he died. He raised the whole of the lite- 
rature of the novel into one of the greatest influ- 
ences that bear on the human mind. The words 
his uncle once said to him, may be applied to the 
v/ork he did, — ^'God bless thee, Walter, my man! 
Thou hast risen to be great, but thou wast always 
good." 

John Gait and Miss Ferrier followed him in de- 
scribing Scottish life and society. With the peace 
of 181 5 arose new forms of fiction, and travel, which 
became very popular when the close of the war with 
Napoleon opened the world again to Englishmen, 
gave birth to the tale of Foreign scenery and manners. 
Thomas Hope's A7iastasiics ( 1 8 1 9) was the first. Lock- 
hart began the Classical novel in Valerius, Fashionable 



\ii.] PROSE FROM GEORGE IIL TO VICTORIA, 131 

society was now painted by Theodore Hook, Mrs. 
Trollope, and Mrs. Gore; and Rural life by Miss 
Mitford in Our Village. Edward Bulvver Lytton began 
with the Fashionable novel in Pelham (1827), and fol- 
lowed it with a long succession of tales on historical, 
classical, and romantic subjects. Towards the close 
of his life, he changed his manner altogether, and The 
CaxtoTis and those that followed are novels of Modern 
Society. The tone of them all from the beginning 
to the end is too high-pitched for real life, but each 
of them being kept in the same key throughout has 
a reality of its own. Charlotte Bronte revived in 
Jane Eyre the novel of Passion, and Miss Yonge set 
on foot the Religious novel in support of a special 
school of theology. We need only mention Captain 
Marryatt, whose delightful sea stories carry on the 
seamen of Smollett to our own times. Miss Martineau 
and Mr. Disraeli carried on the novel of Political 
opinion and economy, and Charles Kingsley applied 
the novel to the social and theological problem.s of our 
own day. Three other great names are too close to us 
to admit of comment : Charles Dickens, William M. 
Thackeray, and the novelist who is known as George 
Eliot. It will be seen then that the Novel claims 
almost every sphere of human interest as its own, 
and it has this special character, that it is the only 
kind of literature in which women have done ex- 
cellently. 

125. History, to which we now turn, was raised 
into the rank of literature in the latter half of the 
eighteenth century by three men. David Hume's 
History of England^ finished 1761, is, in the import- 
ance it gives to letters, in its clear narrative and 
style, and in the writer's endeavour to make it a 
philosophic whole, our first literary history. Of Dr. 
Robertson's Histories of Scotland, of Charles V., and 
of America, the two last are literary by their descrip- 
tive and popular style, and show how our historical 

12 



132 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

interests were reaching beyond our own land. Edward 
Gibbon excelled the others in his Decline a?id Fall 
of the Rof7ian Empire^ completed in 1788. The 
execution of his work was as accurate and exhaus- 
tive as a scientific treatise. Gibbon's conception of 
the whole subject was as poetical as a great picture. 
Rome, eastern and western, was painted in the centre, 
dying slowly like a lion. Around it he pictured all 
the nations and hordes that wrought its ruin, told 
their stories from the beginning, and the results on 
themselves and on the world of their victories over 
Rome. The collecting and use of every detail of the 
art and costume and manners of the times he de- 
scribed, the reading and use of all the contemporary 
literature, the careful geographical detail, the mar- 
shalling of all this information with his facts, the great 
imaginative conception of the work as a whole, and 
the use of a full and perhaps too heightened style to 
add importance to the subject, gave a new impulse 
and a new model to historical literature. The con- 
temptuous tone of the book is made still more re- 
markable by the heavily-laden style, and the mono- 
tonous balance of every sentence. The bias Gibbon 
had against Christianity illustrates a common fault of 
historians. The historical value of Hume's history 
was spoiled by his personal disHke of the principles 
of our Revolution. W. Mitford's History of Greece^ 
completed in 18 10, is made untrue by his hatred of a 
democracy; and Dr. Lingard's excellent History of 
Enoland, 1819, is influenced by his dislike of the 
Reformation. Henry Hallam was the first who 
wrote history in this country with so careful a love of 
truth, and with so accurate a judgment of the relative 
value of facts and things, that prejudice was ex- 
cluded. His Europe during the Middle Ages, 18 18, 
and his Literature of Europe, 1837-8, are distinguished 
for their exhaustive and judicial summing up of facts ; 
and his Constitutiofial History of England, 1827, set 



VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE IIL TO VICTORIA, 133 

on foot a new kind of history in the best way. Our 
own history now engaged a number of writers. Lord 
Macaulay's great work told the story of the Revolu- 
tion of 1688 in a style sometimes too emphatic, often 
monotonous from its mannerism, but always clear. 
Its vivid word-painting of characters and great events, 
and the splendid use in such descriptions of his vast 
knowledge of details, gave as great an impulse to the 
literature of history as Gibbon had done in his day, 
and his Historical Essays on the times and statesmen 
between the Restoration and Pitt are masterpieces of 
their kind. 

Sir Francis Palgrave gave interest to the study of 
the early English period, and in our own day, a 
critical historical school has arisen, of which Mr. 
Freeman and Professor Stubbs are the leaders. 

As the interest in the history of our own land in- 
creased, our interest in the history of the world in- 
creased. Dean Milman's Zr/i"/^rj^^Za//;2 Christianity 
well deserves, by its brilliant and romantic style, the 
title of fine literature. Greece old and new found her 
best historians in Bishop Thirlwall, George Grote, and 
Mr. Finlay ; Rome in Dr. Arnold. The history of 
events near at hand on the Continent was also taken 
up with care. Among the books of this class, I 
mention, for their special literary character and style, 
wSir William Napier's History of the Peninsidar War, 
and Thomas CdiV\y\€^ History of the French Revolution, 
Both are written in too poetic prose, and the latter is a 
kind of epic, and full of his realistic, fantastic, and un- 
equal power of representing persons and things. With 
him we close this account of historical literature, and 
return to the eighteenth century. 

126. Biography and Travel are linked at many 
points to History. The first was lifted into a higher 
place in literature by Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 
1779-81, and by BoswelPs Life of Johnson, 1 7 9 1 . Sin ce 
that time a multitude of biographies have poiared from 



134 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

the press, and have formed useful materials for his- 
tory. Few of them have reached literary excellence. 
Southey's Life of Nelson^ Lockharf s Life of Scott, 
Moore's Life of Lord Byron ; or in our own days, 
Forster's Life of Goldsmith, and Dean Stanley's Life 
of Arnold, rise out of a crowd of inferior books. 

The production of books of Travel since James 
Bruce left for Africa in 1762 till the present day has 
increased as rapidly almost as that of the Novel, and 
there is scarcely any part of the world that has not 
been visited and described. In this way a vast amount 
of materials has been collected for the use of philoso- 
phers, poets, and historians. Travel has rarely pro- 
duced literature, but it has been one of its assistants. 

127. Theological Literature received a new im- 
pulse in 1738-91 from the evangelising work of John 
Wesley and Whitfield ; and their spiritual followers, 
John Scott, Newton, and Cecil made by their writ- 
ings the Evangelical school. William Paley, in his 
Evidences, and Sydney Smith, well known as a wit 
and an essayist, defended Christianity from the com- 
mon-sense point of view; while the sermons of Robert 
Hall and of Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine 
examples of devotional and philosophical eloquence. 

The decay of the Evangelical school was hastened 
by the writings of Coleridge, whose religious philo- 
sophy, in the Aids to Reflection and other books, 
created the school which has been called the Broad 
Church. Dr. Arnold's sermons supplied it with an 
element of mascuHne good sense. Frederick Maurice 
in his numerous works added to it mystical piety and 
one-sided learning, Charles Kingsley a rough and 
ready power, and Frederick Robertson gave it passion, 
sentiment, subtilty, and a fine form. At the same 
time that Maurice began to write (1830-32) the com- 
mon-sense school of theology was continued by Arch- 
bishop Whately's works ; and in strong reaction against 
the Evangelicals, the High Church party rose into 



VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA. 135 

prominence in Oxford, and was chiefly supported 
by the tracts and sermons of John Henry Newman, 
whose work, with Keble's Christian Year, a collection 
of exqu.sitely wrought hymns, belongs to literature. 

128. Philosophical and Political Literature 
were both stimulated by the great movement of thought 
on all subjects pertaining to the natural rights of man, 
which was led by Voltaire and Rousseau. In philosophy 
the historian David Hume (1738—1755) led the way, 
and the transparent clearness of his style gave full 
force to opinions which made utility the only measure 
of virtue, and the knowledge of our ignorance the 
only certain knowledge. An eloquent school of Scotch 
metaphysicians came after him, and for the most 
part opposed the ideal system on which Hume had 
founded his famous argument on causation. Dr. Reid, 
Dr. Stewart, and Dr. Brown carry this school on to 
1820. The Utilitarian view of morals was put forth with 
great power by Jeremy Bentham, and in our own day by 
John Stuart Mill, whose name, with Sir W. Hamilton's 
and Professor WhewelFs, belongs to the literature of 
philosophy. The philosophy of Jurisprudence may 
be said to have been founded by Jeremy Bentham, 
and law was for the first time made a little clear to 
common minds by Blackstone's Commentaries. 

129. In political literature, Edmund Burke 
is our greatest, almost our only, writer of this time. 
From 1756 to 1797, when he died, his treatises and 
speeches proved their right to the title of literature by 
their extraordinary influence on the country. Philo- 
sophical reasoning and poetic passion were wedded 
together in them on the side of conservatism, and 
every art of eloquence was used with the mastery that 
imagination gives. His Thoughts on the Cause of the 
Present Discontents^ i773» was perhaps the best of his 
works in point of style. The Reflections on the French 
RevoliUio7t, 1790, and the Lette7's on a Regicide Peace, 
1796-7, were the most powerful. The first of these 



136 ENGLISH LITERATURE, [chap. 

two spread all over England a terror of the principles 
of the Revolution ; the second increased the eager- 
ness of England to carry on the war with France. 
Ail his w^ork is more literature then oratory. Many of 
his speeches enthralled their hearers, but many more 
put them to sleep. The very men, however, who 
slept under him in the House read over and over 
again the same speech when published with renewed 
delight. Goldsmith's praise of him — that he *^ wound 
himself into his subject like a serpent" — gives the 
reason why he sometimes failed as an orator, why he 
always succeeded as a writer. 

130. Before Burke, a new class of political writings 
had arisen which concerned themselves with social 
and economical reform. The immense increase 
of the industry, wealth, and commerce of the country 
from 1720 to 1770, aroused inquiry into the laws that 
regulate wealth, and Adam Smith, a professor at 
Glasgow, who had in 1759 written his book on the 
Moral Sentiments^ published in 1776 the Wealth of 
Nations, By its theory, that labour is the source of 
wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom 
to pursue his own interest in his own way is the best 
means of increasing the wealth of the country ; by its 
proof that all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to 
prom.ote commerce, were stumbling-blocks in the way 
of the wealth of any state, he created the Science of 
Political Economy, and started the theory and practice 
of Free Trade. All the questions of labour and capital 
were now placed on a scientific basis, and since that 
time the literature of the whole of the subject has en- 
gaged great thinkers. Connected with this were all the 
writings on the subjects of the poor, and education. 
and refor7n. The Methodist movement gave the 
first impulse to popular education, and stirred men 
to take interest in the cause of the poor. This new 
philanthropy, stirred still more by the theories of the 
French Revolution concerning the right of men to 



VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE III, TO VICTORIA, 137 

freedom and equality, took up the subjects of slavery, 
of prison reform, of the emancipation of the Catholics, 
and of a wider representation of the people, and their 
literature fills a large space till 1832, when Reform 
brought forward new subjects, and the old subjects 
under new forms. 

131. Miscellaneous Literature. — During the 
whole of this time, from the days of Johnson till 1832, 
the finer literature of prose had flourished. With 
Samuel Johnson began the literary man such as we 
know him in modern times, who, independent of 
patronage or party, lives by his pen, and finds in the 
public his only paymaster. His celebrated letter to 
Lord Chesterfield gave the death-blow to patronage. 
The great Dictionary of tJu English Language^ 17555 
at which he worked unhelped, and which he published 
without support, was the first book that appealed 
solely to the public He represents thus a new class. 
But he was also the last representative of the literary 
king who, like Dryden and Pope, held a kind of court 
in London. When he died (1784) London was no 
longer the only literary centre, and poetry and prose 
were produced from all parts of the country. 

The miscellaneous literature of the latter half of 
the eighteenth ceniu7y, passing over Johnson and 
Goldsmith, whom we have already touched on, includes 
the admirable Letters of Gray the poet ; Thomas 
Warton's History of English Poetry which founded 
a new school of poetic criticism; the many collections 
of periodical essays all of which ceased in 1787 ; 
Burke's Liqtdry into the Origin of our Ideas of the 
Sublime and Beautiful ; and the Lette7's of Junius^ 
political invectives written in a style which has pre- 
served them to this day. 

The miscellaneous literature of t/ie early part of 
the nineteenth century took mainly the form of long 
essays, most of which were originally published in 
the Reviews and Magazines. It was in Blackitwod' s 



X sS ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

Magazine that Christopher North (Professor Wilson) 
published the Nodes Ambrosia?ice — lively conversations 
that treated of all the topics of the day. It was in the 
Edinburgh Review tJiat Macaulay and Sydney Smith 
and Jeffrey wrote essays on literature, politics, 
and philosophy. It was in Eraser's Magazine that 
Thomas Carlyle first came before the public with 
Sartor Resartus and the Lectures on Heroes j books 
which gave an entirely new impulse to the generation 
in which we live. Of all these miscellaneous writers, 
Carlyle was the most original, and Thomas De Quin- 
cey the greatest writer of English prose. De Quincey's 
style has so pecuHar a quality that it stands alone. 
The sentences are built up like passages in a fugue, 
and there is nothing in English literature wliich can 
be compared in involved melody to the prose of the 
Cojifessions of a?i English Opinm Eater. One man 
alone in our own day is as great a master of English 
Prose, John Ruskin. He has created a new literature, 
that of art, and all the subjects related to it; and the 
work he has done has more genius and is more original 
than any other prose work of his time. Some of De 
Quincey's best work was done on the hves of the poets 
of his day; and indeed a great part of the miscellaneous 
literature consisted of Criticism on p.oetry^ past and 
present. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Campbell 
carried on that study of the Elizabethan and earlier 
poetry which Warton had begun in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Wordsworth wrote admirable prose on poetry, 
and the prose of his Essays just now published, espe- 
cially of that on the Convention of Cintra, is quite 
stately. W. Hazlitt, W. S. Landor, Jeffrey, and a 
host of others added to the literature of criticism, and 
the ceaseless discussion of the works of the poets 
made them the foremost literary figures of the day. It 
is the work of the poets that we now take up, and 
in tracing it from the time of Pope to 1832 we shall 
complete this Primer. 



VIII.] POETRY FROM ino TO 1^612, 139 

CHAPTER VIII. 

POETRY, FROM 1730 TO 1832. 

Ramsay's Gen'le Shepherd^ 1725- — Thomson's Seasons^ 1730- 
—Gray and Collins, PoeKis, 1746-1757. — Goldsmith's 
Traveller, 1764- — Chatterton's Poenis^ 1770- — Blake's 
Poetns^ 1777-1794.— Crabbe's Village, 1783.— Cowper's 
Task, 1785.— Burns's first Poems, 1786- — Campbell's 
Pleasures of Hope, 1799. — Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, 
1798 ; his Prelude, 1806 ; E-xcursion, 1814- — Coleridge's 
Christabel^ 1805- — Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Mar- 
mion. Lady of the Lake^ 1805-8-10. — Byron's jP<?^wj-, 1807- 
1823.— Shelley's Poems, 1813-1821.— Keats' Poems, 1817- 
1820- — Tennyson's _/f;'S-/ Poems, 1830. 

132. The Elements and Forms of the New 
Poetry. — ^The poetry we are now to study may be 
divided into two periods. The first dates from about 
the middle of Pope's life, and closes with the pub- 
lication of Cowper's Task^ 17^5; the second begins 
with the Task and closes in 1832. The first is not 
v^rongly called a time of transition. The influence 
of the poetry of the past lasted ; new elements were 
s.dded to poetry, and new forms of it took shape. 
There was a change also in the style and in the 
subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall bring 
together the various poetical works of this period. 

(i.) The iiifliience of the didactic and satirical poetry 
of the critical school lingered among the new ele- 
ments which I shall notice. It is found in Johnson's 
two satires on the manners of his time, the London, 
1738, and the Vaiiity of Human Wishes, 1749; in 
Robert Blair's dull poem of The Grave, 1743; in 
Edward Young's Night Thoughts, 1743, a poem 
on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires on 
The Universal Passion of Fame; in the tame 
work of Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend ; and 



I40 ENGLISH LITERA TURE, [chap. 

in the short-lived but vigorous satires of Charles 
Churchill, who died in 1764^ twenty years after 
Savage. The Pleasures of the I?naglnation, 1744? 
by Mark Akenside, belongs also in spirit to the time 
of Queen Anne, and was suggested by Addison's 
essays in the Spectator on imagination. 

(2.) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- 
vived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Not only 
correct form, for which Pope sought, but beautiful 
form also was sought after. Men like Thomas Gray 
and William Collins strove to pour into their work 
that simpHcity of beauty which the Greek poets 
and Italians like Petrarca had reached as the last 
result of genius restrained by art. Their poems, pub- 
lished between 1746 and 1757, are exquisite examples 
of perfectly English work wrought in the spirit of 
classic art. They remain apart as a unique type of 
poetry. The refined workmanship of these poets, their 
manner of blending together natural feeling and natural 
scenery, their studious care in the choice of words 
are worthy of special study. 

(3.) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier poets 
like Chaucer, and of the whole course of poetry in 
Efigland, was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 
and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope ; 
but the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray like 
Pope projected a history of English poetry, and his 
Ode on the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new 
interest. Thomas Warton wrote his Histo7y of English 
Poetry, 1774-78, and in doing so gave fresh material 
to the poets. They began to take delight in the 
childlikeness and naturalness of Chaucer as dis- 
tinguished from the artificial and critical verse of the 
school of Pope. Shakespeare was studied in a more 
accurate way. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Han- 
mer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were 
succeeded by Johnson's in 1765 ; and Garrick the actor 



VIII.] POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 141 

began the restoration of the genuine text of Shake- 
speare's plays for the stage, 

Spenser formed the spirit and work of some 
poets, and T, Warton wrote an essay on the Faerie 
Queen. WiUiam ^\\^x\'$Xox\€^ Schoolmistress^ 1742, was 
one of these Spenserian poems, and so was the Castle 
of Indolence^ 174^? by James Thomson author of the 
Seasons, James Beattie, in the Minstrel, 1774, a 
didactic poem, followed the stanza and manner of 
Spenser. 

(4,) A new element — interest in the roinaiitic past 
— was added by the publication of Dr. Percy's 
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ^ ^l^S* The nar- 
rative ballad and the narrative romance, afterwards 
taken up and perfected by Sir Walter Scott, now struck 
their roots afresh in English poetry. Men began to 
seek among the ruder times of history for wild, 
natural stories of human life ; and the pleasure in 
these increased and accompanied the growing love of 
lonely, even of savage scenery. The Ossian, 1762, 
of James Macpherson, which gave itself out as a 
translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of 
this new element. Still more remarkable in this way 
were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, the * mar- 
vellous boy,' who died by his own hand in 1770, at 
the age of seventeen. They were imitations of old 
poetry. He pretended to have discovered in a muni- 
ment room at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdi^i 
and other poems by an imaginary monk named Thomas 
Rowley. Written with the old spelling, and with a 
great deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them 
a great controversy. I may mention as an instance 
of the same tendency, even before the Reliques, Gray's 
translations from the Norse and British poetry and 
his poem of the Bard, in which the bards of Wales 
are celebrated. 

133. Change of Style, — We have seen how the 
natural style of the Elizabethan poets had ended by 



142 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

producing an unnatural style. In reaction from this 
the critical poets set aside natural feeling as having 
nothing to do with the expression of thought in verse, 
and wrote according to rules of art which they had 
painfully worked out. Their style in doing this lost life 
and fire ; and losing these, lost art which has its roots 
in emotion, and gained artifice which has its roots 
in intellectual analysis. Being unwarmed by any 
natural feeling it became as unnatural, considered as 
a poetic style, as that of the later Elizabethan poets. 
We may sum up then the whole history of the style 
of poetry from Elizabeth to George I. — the style of 
the first-rate poets being excepted — in these words : 
Nature without Af^, and Art nnthout JVatt^re, had 
reached similar but not identical results in style. 
Bat in the process two things had been learned. 
First, that artistic rules were necessary and secondly, 
that natural feeling was necessary, in order that poetry 
should have a style fitted to express nobly the emo- 
tions and thoughts of man. The way was therefore 
now made ready for a style in which the Art should 
itself be Nature, and it sprang at once into being 
in the work of the poets of this time. The style of 
Gray and Collins is polished to the finest point, and 
yet is instinct with natural feeling. Goldsmith is 
natural even to simplicity, and yet his verse is even 
more accurate than Pope's. Cowper's style, in such 
poems as the Lines to his Mother's Picture^ and in 
lyrics like the Loss of the Royal George^ arises out of 
the simplest pathos, and yet is as pure in expression 
as Greek poetry. The work was then done ; but as 
yet the element of fervent passion did not enter 
into poetic style. We shall see how that came in 
after 1789. 

T34. Change of Subject. — Nature. — We have 
said at the beginning of this Primer that poets worked 
on two great subjects, — Man and Nature. Up to the age 
of Pope the subject of Man was alone treated, and we 



VIII.] POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 143 

have seen how many phases it went through. There 
remained the subject of Nature and of man's relation 
to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea and sky 
and all that men feel in contact with them. Natural 
scenery had been hitherto only used as a background 
to the picture of human life. It now began to take 
a much larger place in poetry and after a time grew to 
occupy a distinct place of its own apart from Man. 
It is the growth of this new subject which will engage 
us now. 

135. The Poetry of Natural Description. — 
We have found already traces in the poets of a pleasure 
in rural things and the emotions they awakened. This> 
appears chiefly among the Puritans, who because they 
hated the politics of the Stuarts before the civil war 
and the corruption of the court after it, lived apart 
from the town in quietude. The best natural descrip- 
tion we have before the time of Pope is that of two- 
Puritans, Marvel and Milton. But the first poem 
devoted to natural description appeared while Pope 
was yet alive in the very midst of a vigorous town 
poetry. It was the Seasons, 1726-30 ; and it is curious, 
remembering what I have said about the peculiar 
turn of the Scotch for natural description, that it 
was the work of James Thomson, a Scotchman. It 
described the scenery and country life of Spring, Sum- 
mer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with his eye upon 
their scenery, and even when he wrote of it in his 
room, it was with "a recollected love." The de- 
scriptions were too much like catalogues, the very fault: 
of the previous Scotch poets, and his style was always; 
heavy and often cold, but he was the first poet who led 
the English people into that new world of nature in 
poetry, which has moved and enchanted us in the 
work of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, 
but which was entirely impossible for Pope to under- 
stand. The impulse he gave was soon followed. Men 
left the town to visit the country and record their 

13 



144 ENGLISH LITE RA TURE. [chap. 

feelings. William Somerville's Chase^ 1735, and John 
Dyer's Grongar Hill^ 1726, a description of a journey 
in South Wales, and his Fleece^ i7575 are full of country 
sights and scenes : even Akenside mingled his spurious 
philosophy with pictures of solitary natural scenery. 

Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. 
Gray's letters, some of the best in the English language, 
describe natural scenery with a minuteness quite new 
in English Literature. In his poetry he used the de- 
scription of nature as " its most graceful ornament," but 
never made it the subject. In the Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard^ and in the Ode on a Distant Prospect of 
Eton College^ natural scenery is interwoven with reflec- 
tions on human life, and used to point its moral. 
Collins observes the same method in his Ode on the 
Passiofis and the Ode to Evening. There is then as 
yet no love of nature for its own sake. A further step 
was made by Oliver Goldsmith in his Traveller^ 
1764, a sketch of national manners and governments, 
2iXi^m\i\^ Deserted Village^ t770- He describes na- 
tural scenery with less emotion than ColHns, and does 
not moralize it like Gray. The scenes he paints are 
pure pictures, and he has no personal interest in them. 
The next step was made by men like the two Wartons 
and by John Logan, 1782. Their poems do not speak 
of nature and human life, but of nature and them- 
selves. They see the reflection of their own joys and 
sorrows in the woods and streams, and for the first 
time the pleasure of being alone with nature apart from 
men became a distinct element in modern poetry. In 
the later poets it becomes one of their main subjects. 
These were the steps towards that love of nature for its 
own sake which we shall find in the poets who followed 
Cowper. One poem of the time almost anticipates it 
It is the Minstrel, 1771, of Thomas Beattie. This 
poem represents a young poet educated almost alto- 
gether by lonely communion with and love of nature, 
and both in the spirit and treatment of the first part of 



VIII.] POETRY FROM \']lo TO 1832. 145 

the Story resembles very closely Wordsworth's descrip- 
tion of his own education by nature in the beginning 
of the Prelude, and the history of the pedler in the first 
book of the Excu7'sio7i. 

136. Further Change of Subject. — Man. — 
During this time the interest in Mankind, that is, in 
Man independent of nation, class and caste, which we 
have seen in prose, and which w^as stimulated by the 
works of Voltaire and Rousseau, began to influence 
poetry. It broke out into a fierce extreme in the French 
Revolution, but long before that event it entered into 
poetry in various ways as it had entered into society 
and politics. One form of it appeared in the interest 
the poets began to take in men of other nations than 
England ; another form of it — and this was increased 
by the Methodist revival — was the interest in the lives 
of the poor. Thomson speaks with sympathy of the 
Siberian exile and the Mecca pilgrim, and the Trav- 
veller of Goldsmith enters into foreign interests. His 
Deserted Village, Shenstone's Schoolmistress, Gray's 
Elegy celebrate the annals of the poor. Michael 
Bruce in his Lochleven praises the " secret prim- 
rose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne 
in his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor 
and paints their sorrows. Connected with this new 
element is the simple ballad of simple love, such as 
Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson, Mickle's Mariner's Wife, 
Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, poems which started 
a new type of human poetry, afterwards worked out 
more completely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. 
In a class apart I call attention to the Song of David, 
a long poem written by Christopher Smart, a friend 
of Johnson's. It will be found in Chambers' "- Cyclo- 
paedia of English Literature." Composed for the 
most part in a madhouse, the song has a touch here 
and there of the overforcefulness and the lapsing 
thoughts of a half insane brain. But its power of 
metre and of imaginative presentation of thoughts and 



146 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious 
poetry ought to make it better known. It is unique 
in style and in character. 

137. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates 
the poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not 
mentioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the 
exception of stray songs its voice was silent for a 
century and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a 
friend of Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic 
humour were followed by the Tea liable Miscellany and 
the Ever-Green^ collections of existing Scottish songs 
mixed up with some of his own. They carried on the 
song of rural life and love and humour which Burns per- 
fected. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gejttle Shepherd^ 
1725, is a pure, tender and genuine picture of Scottish 
life and love among the poor and in the country. 
Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he 
kindled the muse of Burns, and his occasional pieces, 
1773, are chiefly, concerned with the rude and hu- 
mourous life of Edinburgh. The Ballad, always con- 
tinuous in Scotland, took a more modern but very 
pathetic form in such productions as Auld Robin Gray 
and the Flo7aers of the Foi-est^ a mourning for those who 
fell at Flodden Field. The peculiarities I have dwelt 
on already continue in this revival. There is the same 
nationality, the same rough wit, the same love of 
nature, but the love of colour has lessened. With 
Robert Burns poetry written in the Scotch dialect 
may be said to say its last word of genius, though it 
lingered on in James Hogg's lovely poem of Kilmeny 
in The Quee?is Wake, 18 13, and continues a song- 
making existence to the present day. 

138. The Second Period of the New Poetry. 
— The new elements and the changes on which I have 
dwelt are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe 
and Burns. But before these we must mention the 
poems of William Blake, the artist, and for three 
reasons, (i.) They represent the new elements. Tie 



VIII,] POETRY FROM \^IQ TO 1832. 147 

Poetical Sketches^ written in 1777, illustrate the new 
study of the EHzabethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, 
and in his short fragment oi Edward III, we hear again 
and again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination. 
A short poem To the Muses is a cry for the restoration 
to English poetry of the old poetic passion it had lost. 
In some ballad poems we trace the influence repre- 
sented by Ossian and given by the publication of 
Percy's Reliqices, (2.) We find also in his work 
certain elements which belonged to the second 
period of which I shall now speak. The love of 
animals is one. A great love of children and the 
poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 
1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Iiinoce7ice and 
Experiejice were written, the simple natural poetry of 
ordinary life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical 
Ballads, 1798. Further still, we find in these poems 
traces of the democratic element, of the hatred of 
priestcraft, and of the war with social wrongs which 
came much later into English poetry. We even find 
traces of the mysticism and the search after the 
problem of life that fill so much of our poetry after 
1832. (3.) But that which is most special in Blake 
is his extraordinary reproduction of the spirit, tone, 
and ring of the Elizabethan songs, of the inimitable 
innocence and fearlessness which belongs to the child- 
hood of a new literature. The little poems too in the 
Songs of Linoceiice^ on infancy and first motherhood, 
and on subjects like the Lainb^ are without rival in 
our language for ideal simplicity and a perfection of 
singing joy. The Songs of Experience giwQ the reverse 
side of the So7tgs of Innocence^ and they see the evil 
of the world as a child in a man's heart would see 
it — with exaggerated and ghastly horror, Blake stands 
alone in our poetry, and his work coming where it 
did, between 1777 and 1794, makes it the more 
remarkable. We turn now to William Cowper who 
represents fully and more widely than either Crabbe 



148 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

or Burns the new elements on which I have 
dwelt. 

139. William Cowper's first poems were the 
Ol?iey Hynms, 1779, written along with John Newton, 
and in these the religious poetry of Charles Wesley 
was continued. The profound personal religion, 
gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which 
fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a theo- 
logical element into English poetry which continually 
increased till within the last ten years, when it has 
gradually ceased. His didactic and satirical poems 
in 1782 link him backwards to the last age. His 
translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces 
from the Latin and Greek, connects him wnth the 
classical influence, his interest in Milton with the 
revived study of the English Poets. The delightful 
and gentle vein of humour which he showed mJoh?i 
Gilpin and other poems reminds us of Addison, and 
opened a new form of verse to poets. With this 
kind of humour is connected a simple pathos of which 
Cowper is our greatest master. The Lines to Ma7y 
Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, wdth the 
Avork of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free 
from artifice had returned to English song. A 
wholly new element was also introduced by him and 
Blake — the love of animals and the poetry of their 
relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after 
poets. His greatest work was the Task^ i7^S- It 
is mainly a description of himself and his life in the 
country, his home, his friends, his thoughts as he 
walks, the quiet landscape of Olney, the life of the 
poor people about him, mixed up with disquisitions 
on political and social subjects, and at the end, a 
prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The 
change in it in relatio7i to the subject of Nature is very 
great, Cowper is the first of the poets who loves 
Nature entirely for her own sake. He paints only what 
he sees, but he paints it with the affection of a child 



r 



VIII.] POETRY FROM I'jzo TO 1832. 149 

for a flower and with the minute observation of a man. 
The chaiige in relation to the subject of Man is equally 
great. The idea of Mankind as a whole which we 
have seen growing up is fully formed in Cowper's 
mind. The range of his interests is as wide as the 
world, and all men form one brotherhood. All the 
social questions of Education, Prisons, Hospitals, city 
and country life, the state of the poor and their sor- 
rows, the question of universal freedom and of slavery, 
of human wrong and oppression, of just and free 
government, of international intercourse and union, 
and above all the entirely new question of the future 
destiny of the whole race, as a whole, are introduced 
by Cowper into English poetry. It is a wonderful 
change ; a change so wonderful that it is like a new 
world. It is in fact the concentration into one 
retired poet's work of all the new thought on the 
subject of mankind which was soon to take so fierce a 
form in Paris. And though splendour and passion 
were added by the poets who succeeded him to the 
new poetry, yet they worked on the thoughts he had 
laid down, and he is their leader. 

140. George Crabbe took up the side of the 
poetry of Man which had to do witli the lives of the 
poor in the Village, 17 ^3? ^.nd in the Parish Register, 
1807. In the short tales related in these books we 
are brought face to face with the sternest pictures of 
humble life, its sacrifices, temptations, righteousness, 
love, and crimes. The prison, the workhouse, the 
hospital and the miserable cottage are all sketched with 
a truthfulness perhaps too unrelenting, and the effect of 
this poetry in widening human sympathies was very great. 
The Borotcgh and Tales in Verse followed, and finally 
the Tales of the Hall in 18 19. His work wanted the 
humour of Cowper, and though often pathetic, and 
always forcible, was too forcible for pure pathos. His 
work on Nature is as minute and accurate, but as limited 
in range of excellence as his work on Man. I may 



1 50 ENGLISH LITER A TURK. [chap. 

mention here in connection with the poetry of the 
poor, the work of Robert Bloomfield, himself a poor 
shoemaker. The Farmer's Boy, 1798, and the Ricral 
Tales, are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern, 
and his descriptions of rural life are brighter and not 
less faithful. The kind of poetry thus started long 
continued in our verse. Wordsworth took it up and 
added to it new features, and Thomas Hood in short 
pieces like the Sojig of the Shirt gave it a direct bearing 
• on social evils. 

1 41. One element, the element of the passion of love, 
had been on the whole absent from our poetry since 
the Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. 
In his love songs we hear again, only with greater 
truth of natural feeling, the same music which in 
the age of EHzabeth enchanted the world. It was 
as a love-poet that he began to write, and the first 
edition of his poems appeared in 1786. But he 
was not only the poet of love, but also of the new 
excitement about Man. Himself poor, he sang the 
poor. Neither poverty nor low birth made a man 
the worse — the man was "a man for 2! that." He 
did the same work in Scotland in 1786 v»4iich 
Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cowper 
in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates 
run together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the 
further widening of human sympathies is shown in 
the new tenderness for animals. The birds, sheep, 
cattle and wild creatures of the wood and field fill as 
large a space in the poetry of Burns as in that of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge. He carried on also the 
Celtic elements of Scotch poetry, but he mingled them 
with others specially Enghsh. The ratthng fun of the 
Jolly Beggars and of Ta77i dShanter is united to a life- 
like painting of human character which is peculiarly 
English. A certain large gentleness of feeling often 
made his wit into that true humour which is more 
English than Celtic, and the passionate pathos of such 



VIII.] POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 151 

poems as Mary in Heaven is connected with this vein 
of humour, and is also more Enghsh than Scotch. 
The special nationality of Scotch poetry is stronger 
in Burns than in any of his predecessors, but it is 
also mingled with a larger view of man than the merely 
national one. Nor did he fail to carry on the Scotch 
love of nature, though he shows the English influence 
in using natural description not for the love of nature 
alone, but as a background for human love. It was 
the strength of his passions and the weakness of 
his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his 
life. Of the three men he had most genius, but the 
poetical motives he supplied us with are fewer than 
those supplied by Cowper. 

142. The French Revolution and the Poets. 
— Certain ideas relating to Mankind considered as a 
whole had been growing up in Europe for more than 
a century, and we have seen their influence on the work 
of Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. These ideas spoke of 
natural rights that belonged to every man and which 
united all men to one another. All men were by right 
equal, and free, and brothers. There was therefore 
only one class, the class of Man ; only one nation, 
the nation of Man, of which all were equal citizens. 
All the old divisions therefore which wealth and rank 
and class and caste and national boundaries had 
made were put aside as wrong and useless. Such ideas 
had been for a long time expressed by France in her 
literature. They were now waiting to be expressed 
in action and in the overthrow of the Bastille in 1789, 
and in the proclamation of the new Constitution in 
the following year France threw them abruptly into 
popular and political form. Immediately they be- 
came living powers in the world, and it is round the 
excitement they kindled in England that the work 
of the poets from 1790 to 1830 can best be grouped. 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey accepted them with 
joy but receded from them when they ended in the 



1 52 ENGLISH LITER A TUKE. [chap. 

violence of the Reign of Terror and in the imperiaHsm 
of Napoleon. Scott hated them, and in disgust at 
the present turned to wiite of the romantic past. 
Byron did not express them themselves, but he ex- 
pressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its 
action against old social opinions. Shelley took them 
up after the reaction against them had begun to die 
away, and re-expressed them. Two men, Rogers and 
Keats, were wholly untouched by them. One special 
thing they did for poetry. They brought back, by the 
powerful feelings they kindled in men, passion into its 
style, into all its work about Man, and through that, 
into its work about Nature. 

143. Robert Southev began his poetical hfe with 
the revolutionary poem of Wat Tyler, 1794 ; and be- 
tween 1802 and 1814 wrote Tkalaba, Madoc, The Ctwse 
of Kehama, and Rode7'lck the Last of the Goths. His 
Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George 
III., and ridiculed by Byron in another Vision, proves 
him to have become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T. 
Coleridge could not turn round so completely, but 
the wild enthusiasm of his early poems was lessened 
when in 1796 he wrote the Ode to the Depa7'ti7ig Yeai- 
and the Ode to Frafice, poems which nearly reach 
subUmity. When France, however, ceasing to be 
the champion of freedom, attacked Switzerland, Cole- 
ridge as well as Wordsworth ceased to believe in 
her and fell back on the old English ideas of 
patriotism and of tranquil freedom. Still the disap- 
pointment was bitter, and the Ode to Defection is 
instinct not only with his own wasted life, but with the 
sorrow of one who has had golden ideals and found 
them turn in his hands to clay. His best work is but 
little, but of its kind it is perfect and unique. For 
exquisite music of metrical movement and for an 
imaginative phantasy, such as- might belong to a world 
where men always dreamt, there is nothing in our 
language to be compared with Ch7'istabel, 1805, and 



v'lii.] POETRY FROM 1^0 TO 1832. 153 

Kiibla Khait^ and to the Ancient Mariner published as 
one of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The little poem 
called Love is not so good, but it touches with great 
grace that with which all sympathise. All that he did 
excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but 
it should be bound in pure gold. 

144. Of all the poets, misnamed Lake Poets, 
William Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 
1770, educated on the banks of Esthwaithe, he loved 
the scenery of the Lakes as a boy, lived among it in 
his manhood, and died in 1850, where Rydal and 
Grasmere Water meet. He took his degree in 1791 at 
Cambridge. The year before he had made a short tour 
on the Continent and stepped on the French shore at 
the very time when the whole land was "mad with 
joy." The end of 1791 saw him again in France 
and living at Orleans. He threw himself eagerly into 
the Revolution, joined the "patriot side," and came 
to Paris just after the September massacre of 1792. 
Narrowly escaping the fate of his friends the Brisso- 
tins, he got home to England before the execution 
of Louis XVI. in 1793, and published his Descriptive 
Sketches, His sympathy with the French continued, 
and he took their side against his own country, 
hating the war that England now set on foot against 
France. He was poor, but his friend Raisley Cal- 
vert left him 900/. and enabled him to live the 
simple hfe he had now chosen, the life of a retired 
poet. At first we find him at Racedown, where in 
1797 he made friendship with Coleridge, and then 
at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where he and Coleridge 
planned and published in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads. 
After a winter in Germany with Coleridge, where the 
Prelude was begun, he took a small cottage at Gras- 
mere, and there in 1805-6 finished the Prelude^ not 
published till 1850. Another set of the Lyrical 
Ballads appeared in 1807, and in 18 14 his philosophi- 
cal poem the Excursion, From that time till his 



1 54 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

death he produced from his home at Rydal Mount 
a great succession of poems. 

145. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude 
is the history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a 
child till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature 
and of Man. His view of Nature was entirely different 
from that which up to his time the poets had held. 
They had believed that the visible universe w^as dead 
matter set in motion like a machine and legulated by 
fixed laws. Wordsworth, on the contrary, said that it 
was alive. There is a soul, he said, in all the worlds ; 
" an active principle subsists" in Nature, and entering 
into all things, gives to each of them a distinct life 
of their own. But the life which varied itself in each 
thing was at the same time One Life. He gave this 
One Life personality, and he called it Nature, but in 
fact it was in his view the one living Spirit of God, 
who in ceaseless action made at each moment the 
outward universe. This soul of Nature was entirely 
distinct from the mind of man, and acted upon it. 
It had powers of its own, desires, feelings and thought 
of its own, and by these it gave education, impulses, 
comfort and joy to the man who opened his heart 
to receive them. The human mind receiving these 
impressions, reflected on them and added to them 
its own thoughts and feelings, and that union of the 
mind of man to the mind in Nature then took place 
which Wordsw^orth thought the true end of the pre- 
arranged harmony he conceived between Nature and 
Humanity. This is the idea which runs through all 
his poetry, and one thing especially followed from it, 
that he was the first who loved Nature with a personal 
love. He could do that because he did not mix up 
Nature with his own mind, nor make her the reflection 
of himself, nor look upon her as dead matter. She 
was a person to him, distinct from himself, and 
therefore capable of being loved as a man loves a 
woman. He could brood on her character, her ways, 



VIII.] POETRY FROM i^o TO i2>Z2. 155 

her words, her hfe, as he did on those of his wife or 
sister. Hence arose his minute and loving observa- 
tion of her and his passionate description of all her 
forms. There was nothing, from the daisy's '' star- 
shaped shadow on the naked stone " to the vast 
landscape seen at sunrise from the mountain top, 
that he did not describe, that he has not made us 
Jove. 

146. Wordsworth and Man. — We have seen 
the vivid interest that Wordsworth took in the new ideas 
about man as they were shown in the French Revo- 
lution. But even before that he relates in the Prelude 
how he had been led through his love of Nature to 
honour Man. The shepherds of the Lake hills, the 
dalesmen, had been seen by him as part of the wild 
scenery in which he hved, and he mixed up their life 
with the grandeur of Nature and came to honour them 
as part of her being. The love of Nature led him 
to the love of Man. It was exactly the reverse order 
to that of the previous poets. At Cambridge, and 
afterwards in the crowd of London and in his first 
tour on the Continent, he received new impressions 
of the vast world of Man, but Nature still remained 
the first. It was only during his life in France and 
in the excitement of the new theories and their activity 
that he was swept- away from Nature and found him- 
self thinking of Man as distinct from her, and first in 
importance. But the hopes he had formed from the 
Revolution broke down. All his dreamsabout a newlife 
of man were made vile when France gave up liberty 
for Napoleon ; and he was left without love of Nature 
or care for Man. It was then that his sister Dorothy, 
herself worthy of mention in a history of Hterature. led 
him back to his early love of Nature and restored 
his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought 
in the simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the 
foundations of a truer view of mankind than the 
theories of the Revolution afforded. And in thinking 

14 



156 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

and writing of the common duties and faith, kindnesses 
and truth of lowly men, he found in Man once more 

** an object of delight, 
Of pure imagination and of love." 

With that he recovered also his interest in the larger 
movements of mankind. His love of liberty and 
hatred of oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the 
enemy of man. A whole series of sonnets followed 
the events on the Continent. One recorded his horror 
at the attack on the Swiss, another mourned the fate 
of Venice, another the fate of Toussaint the negro 
chief; others celebrated the struggle of Plofer and the 
Tyrolese, others the struggle of Spain. Two thanks- 
giving odes rejoiced in the overthrow of the oppressor 
at Waterloo. He became conservative in his old 
age, but his interest in social and national movements 
did not decay. He wrote on Education, the Poor 
Laws, and other subjects. When almost seventy he 
took the side of the Carbonari, and sympathised 
with the Italian struggle. He was truly a poet of 
Mankind. But his chief work was done in his own 
country and among his own folk ; and he was the 
first who threw around the lives of homely men and 
women the glory and sweetness of song, and taught 
us to know the brotherhood of all men in a more 
beautiful way than the wild way of the Revolution. 
He lies asleep now among the people he loved, in the 
green churchyard of Grasmere, by the side of the 
stream of Rothay, in a place as quiet as his life. Few 
spots on earth are more sacred than his grave. 

147. Criticism must needs confess that much of his 
work is prosaic in thought, but the form of it is always 
poetic j that is, the thoughts are expressed in a way 
prose never would express them. His theory about 
poetic diction, that it should be the ordinary language 
men use in strong emotion, may seem to contradict 
this ; but as Coleridge has shown, Wordsworth did not 



VIII.] POETRY FROM il^p TO 1833. 157 

practise his theory, and where he did the resnlt was 
not poetry. His style in blank verse is the likest to 
Milton that we possess, but it is more feminine than 
Milton's. He is like Milton also in this, that he ex- 
celled in the Sonnet, which we may say he restored to 
modern poetry. Along with the rest of all the poets 
of the time he revived old measures and invented new. 
His philosophy of Nature we have explained : his 
human philosophy, of which the Exciirsio?i is the best 
example, was no deeper than a lofty and grave morahty 
created, in union with an imaginative Christianity. He 
beheved in himself when all the world disbelieved in him, 
and he has been proved right and the world wrong. 

148. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear 
friend, and his career as a poet began when Wordsworth 
first came to Grasmere, with the Lay of the Last Minstrel^ 
1805. Marinion followed in 1808, and the Lady of 
the Lake mi^iQ. These were his best poems; the 
others, with the exception of some lyrics which touch 
the sadness and brightness of life with equal power, do 
not count in our estimate of him. He perfected the 
narrative poem. In Maimion and the Lady of the 
Lake his wonderful inventiveness in narration is at 
its height, and it is matched by the vividness of 
his natural description. No poet, and in this he 
carries on the old Scotch quality, is a finer colourist. 
His landscapes are painted in colour, and the colour 
is always true. Nearly all his natural description 
is Scotch, and he was the first who opened to the 
delight of the world the wild scenery of the High- 
lands and the Lowland moorland. He touched it all 
with a pencil so light, graceful, and true, that the 
very names are made romantic. 

149. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas 
Campbell. His earliest poem the Pleasures of LLope^ 
1799, belonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and in 
its artificial feeling for Nature, to the time of Thomson 
and Gray rather than to the newer time. His later 



1 58 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

poems, such as Gertrude of Wyoming B.nd O' Connor's 
Child, were far more natural, but they lost the superb 
rhetoric so remarkable in the Pleasures of Hope. 
Campbell will chiefly live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden, 
the Battle of the Baltic, the Mariners of England, are 
splendid specimens of the war poetry of England ; 
and the So7ig to the Evening Star and Lord Ulli?i's 
Daughter are full of tender feeling, and mark the in- 
fluence of the more natural style that Wordsworth 
had brought to perfection. 

T50. Rogers and Moore. — Samuel Rogers is 
another poet whose work is apart from the great 
movement of the Revolution. In his long life of 
ninety years he produced two octavo volumes. The 
Pleasures of Memory, 1792, his first poem, links him 
to the past generation and has its characters. The 
later poems added to it in 18 12, and the Italy, 1822, 
are the work of a slow and cultivated mind, and 
contain some laboured but fine descriptions. The 
curious thing is that, living apart in a courtly region 
of culture, there is not a trace in all his work that 
Europe and P^ngland and Society had passed during 
his life though a convulsion of change. To that 
convulsion the best work of Thomas Moore, an 
Irishman, may be referred. Ireland during Moore's 
youth endeavoured to exist under the dreadful and 
wicked weight of its Penal Code. The excitement 
of the French Revolution kindled the anger of 
Ireland into the rebellion of 1798, and Moore's 
genius, such as it was, into writing songs to the Irish 
airs collected in 1796. The best of these have for 
their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland against 
England. They went ever^^where with him into 
society, and it is not too much to say that they helped 
by the interest they stirred to produce Catholic 
Emancipation. Moore's Oriental tales in Zalla Rookh 
are chiefly flash and glitter, but they are pleasant read- 
ing. He had a slight, pretty, rarely true, lyrical power, 



VIII.] POETRY FROM i^lQ TO 1%12, 159 

and all the songs have this one excellence, they are 
truly things to be sung. 

151. The post - Revolution Poets. — Lord 
Byron. — We turn to very different types of men when 
we come to Shelley and Keats, whom we may call 
post-Revolution poets. Childe Harold^ cantos i. ii., 
Byron's first true poem, appeared in 1812, Shelley's 
Queen Mat in 1813, Keats's first vohime in 181 7. Of 
the three, Lord Byron had the most of the quality 
we may call force. Born in 1788, his Hours of Idleness^ 
a collection of short poems, in 1807, was mercilessly 
lashed in the Edinburgh Review, The attack only 
served to awaken his genius, and he replied with as- 
tonishing vigour in the satire of English Bards and 
Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel gave birth to 
the first two cantos of Childe Harold, to the Giaour "^w^ 
the Bride of Abydosm 18 13, to the Corsair and Lara 
in 1 8 14. The Siege of Corinth^ Paris ina^ the Prisoner 
of Chillon, Maitfred, and Childe Harold were finished 
before 18 19. In 18 18 he began a new style mBeffo^ 
which he developed fully in the successive issues of 
Don Juan, 1819-1823. During this time a number of 
dramas came from him, partly historical, as his Ma^'ino 
Faliero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had 
been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem 
it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Misso- 
longhi he was seized with fever, and passed away in 
April 1824. 

152. The position of Byron as a poet is a 
curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of 
the present. Something of the school of Pope clings 
to him ; in Childe Harold he imitates Spenser, yet 
no one so completely broke away from old measures 
and old manners to make his poetry individual, not 
imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in 
the human questions which were so strongly felt by 
Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly 
narrative poetry written that he might talk of himself 



1 60 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, [chap. 

and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy 
except that which centres round the problem of his 
own being. Cain, the most thoughtful of his pro- 
ductions, is in reality nothing more than the repre- 
sentation of the way in which the doctrines of original 
sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We 
feel naturally great interest in this strong person- 
ality, put before us with such obstinate power, but 
it wearies at last. Finally it wearied himself. As 
he grew in thought, he escaped from his morbid self, 
and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan, It 
is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revo- 
lutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all 
the conventionality of social morality and religion and 
politics. It claimed for himself and for others abso- 
lute freedom of individual act and thought in oppo- 
sition to that force of society which tends to make all 
men after one pattern. This was the best result of 
his work, though the way in which it was done can 
scarcely be approved. He escaped still more from 
his diseased self when, fully seized on by the new spirit 
of setting men free from oppression, he sacrificed his 
life for the deliverance of Greece. 

As the poet of Nature he belongs also to the old and 
the new school. We have mentioned those poets 
before Cowper who had less a sympathy with Nature 
than a sympathy with themselves as they forced her 
to reflect them, men who followed the vein of Rous- 
seau. Byron's poetry of natural description is often 
of this class. But he often escapes from this posi- 
tion of the 1 8th century poets, and with those of the 
19th looks on Nature as she is, apart from himself; and 
this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of 
Man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal 
power and the ease that comes from it, in w^hich he 
resembles Dryden, that marks him specially. But it 
is always more power of the intellect than of the 
imagination. 



VIII.] POETRY FROM \^10 TO 1832, 161 

153, In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, 
the imagination is supreme and the intellect its servant. 
He produced while yet a boy some utterly worthless 
tales, but soon showed in Qiiee7i Mab, 1813, the in- 
fluence of the revolutionary era, combined in him with 
a violent attack on the existing forms of religion. 
The poem is a poor one, but its poverty prophesies 
greatness. Its chief idea was the new one that had 
come into literature — the idea of the future perfection 
of mankind in a future golden age. The whole 
heart of Shelley was absorbed in this conception, in 
its faith, and in the hopes it stirred. To help the 
world towards it and to denounce and overthrow all 
that stood in its way was the object of half of Shelley's 
poetry. The other half was personal, an outpouring 
of himself in his seeking after the perfect ideal 
he could not find, and worse still, could not even con- 
ceive. Queen Mab is an example of the first, Alastor^ 
of the second. The hopes for man with which 
Queen Mab was written grew cold; he himself fell 
ill and looked for death; the world seemed chilled 
to all the ideas he loved, and he turned from 
writing about mankind to describe in Alastor the 
life and wandering and death of a lonely poet. It 
was himself he described, but Shelley was too stern 
a moralist to allow that a life lived apart from 
human interests was a noble one, and the title of 
the poem expresses this. It is Alastor — '' a spirit of 
evil, a spirit of sohtude." How wrong he felt such 
a life is seen in his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 
181 7. He wrote it with the hope that men were 
beginning to recover from the apathy and despair 
into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had 
thrown them, and to show them what they should strive 
and hope for, and destroy. But it is still only a mar- 
tyr's hope that the poet possesses. The two chief 
characters of the poem, Laon and Cythna, are both 
slain in their struggle against tyranny, but their sacrifice 



i62 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

is to bring forth hereafter the fruit of freedom. The 
poem itself has finer passages in it than Alastor^ but 
as a whole it is inferior to it. It is quite formless. The 
same year Shelley went to Italy, and renewed health 
and the climate gave him renewed power. Rosalind 
and Helen appeared, and in the beginning of 1 8 1 8 Julian 
a?id Maddalo. The first tale circles round a social 
subject that interested him, the second is a familiar 
conversation on the story of a madman in San Lazzaro 
at Venice. In it his poetry becomes more masculine, 
and he has for the first time won mastery over his 
art. The new fife and joy he had now gained brought 
back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out 
into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unboimd, 
Prometheus bound on his rock represents Humanity 
sufiering under the reign of Evil impersonated in 
Jupiter. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated 
from Prometheus, is the all-pervading Love which in 
loving makes the universe of nature. The time comes 
when Evil is overthrown. Prometheus is then delivered 
and united to Asia; that is, Man is wedded to the spirit 
in Nature, and Good is all in all. The fourth act is the 
choral song of the regenerated universe. It is the 
finest example we have of the working out in poetry 
of that idea of a glorious destiny for the whole of 
Man which Cow^per introduced into English poetry. 
The marriage of Asia and Prometheus, of Nature 
and Humanity, the distinct existence of each for that 
purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's difi'erently 
expressed; and Shelley and he are the only two 
poets who have touched it philosophically, Words- 
worth with most contemplation, Shelley with most 
imagination. Shelley's poetry of Man reached its 
height in Prometheus Unbound, and he turned now 
to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two 
of these were neither personal nor for the sake of 
man. The first was the drama of the Ce7id, the 
gravest and noblest tragedy since Webster wrote, 



VIII.] POETRY FROM i']io TO 1832. 163 

which we possess. It is as restrained in expression 
as the previous poem is exuberant; yet there is no 
poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and 
imagery are so wrought together. The second was the 
Adonais, a lament for the death of John Keats. It is 
a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit, 
belonging in expression, thought, and feeling to that 
world above the senses in which Shelley habitually 
lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of 
his lyrics belong, Epipsychidmi is the most impalpable, 
but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the 
finest poem he ever wrote. No critic can ever com- 
prehend it ; it is the artist's poem, and all Shelley's 
philosophy of life is contained in it. Of the same 
class is the Witch of Atlas^ the poem in which he 
has personified divine Imagination in her work in 
poetry and all her attendants and all her doings 
among men. 

As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily 
great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, 
as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wi?id, mingle 
together personal feelings and prophetic hopes for 
Man. Some are lyrics of Nature ; some are dedicated 
to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; 
others belong to the passion of love, and others are 
written on the shadows of dim dreams of thought. 
They form together the most sensitive, the most ima- 
ginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible 
lyrical poetry we possess. 

As the poet of Nature, he had the same idea as 
Wordsworth, that Nature was aUve ; but while Words- 
worth made the active principle which filled and made 
Nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. As each 
distinct thing in Nature had to Wordsworth a thinking 
spirit in it, so each thing had to Shelley a loving spirit 
in it ; even the invisible spheres of vapour sucked by 
the sun from the forest pool had each their indwell- 
ing spirit We feel then that Shelley, as well as Words- 



1 64 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [chap. 

worth, and for a similar reason, could give a special 
love to, and therefore describe vividly, each thing 
he saw. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature 
which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the 
power in a far greater degree than they of describing 
a vast landscape melting into indefinite distance. 
In this he stands first among English poets, and is 
in poetry what Turner was in landscape painting. 
Along with this special quality of vastness his colour 
is as true as Scott's, but truer in this, that it is full 
of half tones, while Scott's is laid out in broad 
yellow, crimson, and blue, in black and white. 

Towards the end of his life his poetry became 
overloaded with mystical metaphysics. What he 
might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty 
he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and 
burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie 
beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium^ " Heart 
of hearts," written on his tomb, well says what all who 
love poetry feel when they think of him. 

154. John Keats Ues near him, cut oif like him 
ere his genius ripened ; not so great, but possessing 
perhaps greater possibilities of greatness ; not so ideal, 
but for that very reason closer in his grasp of nature 
than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different 
from Shelley — he had no care whatever for the great 
human questions which stirred Shelley ; the present 
was entirely without interest to him. He marks the 
close of that . poetic movement which the ideas of 
the Revolution in France had started in England, as 
Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, find- 
ing nothing to move him in an age which had now 
sunk into apathy on these points, went back to 
Greek and mediaeval life to find his subjects, and 
established, in doing so, that which has been called 
the literary poetry of England. His first subject after 
some minor poems in 1817 was Endy^nion^ 1818, his 
last Hyperion^ 1820. These, along with Lamia, were 



VIII.] POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 165 

poems of Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and 
all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no 
one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface 
is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion, a frag- 
ment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself 
like a Titanic torso, and in it the faults of Endymion 
are repaired and its promise fulfilled. Both are filled 
with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats, 
the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its 
rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in the singleness 
of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially 
the artist, and the true father of the latest modern 
school of poetry. Not content with carrying us into 
Greek life, he took us back into medieval romance, 
and in this also he started a new type of poetry. 
There are two poems which mark this revival — Isabella, 
and the Eve of St, Agnes, Isabella is a version of 
Boccaccio's tale of the Pot of Basil ; St. Agnes'' Eve 
is, as far as I know, original ; the former is purely 
mediaeval, the latter is tinged with the conventional 
mediaevalism of Spenser. Both poems are however 
modern and individual. The overwrought daintiness of 
style, the pure sensuousness, the subtle flavour of feel- 
ing, belong to no one but Keats. Their originality has 
caused much imitation of them, but they are too 
original for imitation. In smaller poems, such as the 
Ode to a Grecian Urn, the poem to Autumn, and 
some sonnets, he is perhaps at his very best. In these 
and in all, his painting of Nature is as close, as direct 
as Wordsworth's ; less full of the imagination that links 
human thought to Nature, but more full of the ima- 
gination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. 
His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write 
when death took him away from the loveliness he 
loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, 
and there he died almost alone. He lies close by 
Shelley, near the pyramid of Gains Cestius. 

155. Modern English Poetry. — Keats marks 



i66 ENGLISH LITERATURE. [chap. 

the exhaustion of the impulse which began with Bums 
and Cowper. There was no longer now in England 
any large wave of public thought or feeling such as 
could awaken poetry. We have then, arising after 
his death, a number of pretty little poems, having no 
inward fire, no idea, no marked character. They 
might be written by any versifier at any time, and 
express pleasant indifferent thought in pleasant verse. 
Such were Mrs. Hemans's poems, and those of L. E. L., 
and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 1830. 
But with the Reform agitation, and the new religious 
agitation at Oxford, which was of the same date, a 
new excitement or a new form of the old, came on 
England, and with it a new tribe of poets arose, 
among whom we live. The elements of their poetry 
were also new, though their germs were sown in the 
previous poetry. It took up the theological, sceptical, 
social, and political questions which disturbed Eng- 
land. It gave itself to metaphysics and to anal)^si3 
of human character. It carried the love of natural 
scenery into almost every county in England, and 
described the whole land. Some of its best writers 
are Robert Browning and his wife, Matthew Arnold, 
and A. H. Clough. One of them, Alfred Tenny- 
son, has for forty years remained the first. All the 
great subjects of his time he has touched poetically, 
and enlightened. His feeling for Nature is accurate, 
loving, and of a wide range. His human sympathy 
fills as wide a field. The large interests of mankind, 
and of his own time, the lives of simple people, and 
the subtler phases of thought and feeling which arise 
in our overwrought society are wisely and tenderly 
written of in his poems. His drawing of distinct 
human characters is the best we have in pure poetry 
since Chaucer wrote. He writes true songs, and he 
has excelled all English writers in the pure Idyll. The 
Idylls of the King are a kind of epic, and he has 
lately tried the drama. In lyrical measures as in the 



VIII.] POETRY FROM i-jio TO \^Z2. 167 

form of his blank verse he is as inventive as original. It 
is by the breadth of his range that he most conclu- 
sively takes the first place among the modern poets. 

Within the last ten years, the impulse given 
in '32 has died away. The vital interest in theo- 
logical and social questions, in human questions of 
the present, has decayed ; and the same thing which 
we find in the case of Keats has again taken place. 
A new class of literary poets have arisen, w^ho 
have no care for a present they think dull, for re- 
ligious questions to which they see no end. They 
too have gone back to Greek and mediaeval and old 
Norse life for their subjects. They find much of their 
inspiration in Italy and in Chaucer ; but they con- 
tinue the love poetry and the poetry of natural de- 
scription. Of them all William Morris is the greatest, 
and of him much more is to be expected. At present 
he is our most delightful story-teller. He loses much 
by being too long, but w^e pardon the length for the 
gentle charm. The Death of Jason and the stories 
told month by month in the Earthly Paradise^ a 
Greek and a mediaeval story alternately, will long 
live to give pleasure to the holiday times of men. It is 
some pity that it is foreign and not English story, but 
we can bear to hear alien tales, for Tennyson has 
always kept us close to the scenery, the traditions, the 
daily life and the history of England; and his last 
poem, the drama of QiceenMary^ 187 5, is written almost 
exactly twelve hundred years since the date of our 
first poem, Caedmon's Paraphrase, To think of one 
and then of the other, and of the great and con- 
tinuous stream of literature that has flowed between 
them, is more than enough to make us all proud of 
the name of Endishmen. 



15 



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